🚨 GW1: Your FPL cheat sheet 🤫

⏰ Gameweek 1’s deadline is 18:30 BST on Friday, 15th August ⏰

💀 The game crashed earlier this week and has a history of crashing as we approach the deadline. Get those teams locked in early to avoid disappointment.

🤦 Alexander Isak is “adamant” he won’t play for Newcastle again - David Ornstein.

🧤 Caoimhin Kelleher is “back on the grass”, but a decision for GW1 yet to be made.

❌ Yoanna Wissa will not feature for Brentford this weekend. He’s “not in the right headspace”.

🏆 Join our mini-league if you haven’t already. The code is ygvli7 if you’re old school. Prizes and eligibility here.

👀 Keep reading to see The Professor’s Gameweek 1 team. Join LazyFPL Premium for up-to-the-minute updates.

Alright?

In a cruel twist of fate that feels like a targeted taunt to FPL managers, Friday, August 15th, is National Relaxation Day here in the UK.

If you care about your FPL team (and, if you’re reading this, we’re going to boldly assume that you do), you probably won’t be doing much relaxing over the next 24 hours. We asked for it to be changed to the National Panic, Anger and Existential Dread Day, but they said no.

Whether you’re a lazy veteran or reading one of our newsletters for the first time, we’re glad to have you here. You’re one of the rare few willing to endure the pain of FPL in pursuit of something far more profound: the chance of scoring some fictional points. For that, we salute you.

The 25/26 season beckons. Let’s stumble through it together, one gameweek at a time. Starting with everything you need to know ahead of Gameweek 1.

Btw, it’s your final chance to upgrade to LazyFPL Premium before Gameweek 1.

By being a member, you’ll get to read the Professor’s Gameweek 1 preview email and see the changes to our experts’ teams as they happen, via the Broadcast WhatsApp channel.

Not only that, but you’ll get all the key news from the press conferences, an invite to our £3,000.00 Premium league, an active WhatsApp chat group and ad-free LazyFPL.

It takes less than a minute to join, and costs the same as a meal deal (even the crap ones, like pasta, a nut bar and a bottle of Buxton).

Summary for the lazy: Be boring.

We’re about to show you how the sausage is made. This isn’t one of those nice sausages you buy in a butcher’s: it’s a cheap one that only has 30% pork.

Are you ready? Fine. You asked for it.

Despite the apparent chaos of football itself, FPL has a predictable strategy that usually works: Choose an Uninteresting, Normal Team (we would usually give this strategy an acronym, but for some reason we’ve been advised against it).

Gameweek 1 isn’t the time to be picking hipster differentials or rogue captains. Your job (for now) is simple: Stay in the mix. Pick the players most other managers are picking. Stick the armband on someone trusty and reliable.

For now, you’re after marriage material, not a one-gameweek stand.

Summary for the lazy: This is an increasingly popular strategy, but if you do it, accept that luck will ultimately determine whether it was a good idea or not.

The first few managers to mention Bench Boosting in Gameweek 1 were executed for heresy. Hanged and then strung up outside FPL Towers as a warning to others.

Those brave reformists paved the way for a strategy that is becoming increasingly popular amongst the normies. But is it a good idea?

The reasons to Bench Boost:

The reasons not to Bench Boost:

How about Gameweek 2?

Gameweek 2 is more compelling because we ought to have a clearer understanding of who will play. The problem with it, of course, is that anything could happen to your team between now and then.

Spoiler: the Professor - who has never finished outside the top 100k - is currently contemplating a Gameweek 2 Bench Boost.

Our verdict:

Some of the best managers in the world (including some of our own resident boffins) are strongly considering a Gameweek 1 Bench Boost. This isn’t a stupid idea. Nobody is ridiculing you if you go for it.

Like any chip, luck (or ‘variance’, as FPL nerds like to call it) plays a part. Anything can happen over the space of one gameweek. If you do play it in Gameweek 1, you’re surrendering yourself to the lap of the FPL Gods a little more than you would be later in the season.

But when have they ever let you down before?

If you’re stressed about the spine of your team - i.e. picking those players that you’ll probably keep for the medium-term, you’ve found the FPL chiropractor.

The graph of Lazy’s favourite picks below ought to click your team into place:

To say that we ought to take pre-season learnings with a pinch of salt would be an insult to the impact that a pinch of salt can have on a dish.

Still, we’ve scraped the barrel for some stuff that might actually help to inform your decision-making in the early stages of the season.

1) Nottingham Forest aren’t scoring goals.

Nottingham Forest have played seven friendlies this pre-season. They’ve only scored once. Their opponents were hardly Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, either. Fixtures included Saudi team Al Qadasiya, Portuguese side Estoril and, the most exotic of them all, Birmingham City.

Let’s not forget that they’ll play in Europe next season, too. Has losing Anthony Elanga hurt them more than they expected?

2) Spurs’ defence still appears to be leaky.

Spurs shipped 65 Premier League goals last season.

Whilst Thomas Frank is odds-on to tighten up their backline, it’d be naive to look to their defenders as a source of clean sheets for now. Still, attacking returns for Micky van de Ven, Cristian Romero and Pedro Porro in the Super Cup keep them interesting. Destiny Udogie missed the game through injury, btw.

3) Newcastle haven’t won a single pre-season game.

It’s not a great time to be a Newcastle fan. They’ve lost out in the transfer window, they’ve lost (4) or drawn (2) all of their six pre-season games, and Alexander Isak is on hunger strike.

Pre-season form can be deceptive, but Howe and his men won’t be coming into Gameweek 1 on a confidence high.

4) Liverpool are mid-shake-up.

Liverpool’s recruitment last season was minimal, but they’ve made up for it this summer. Two new full-backs are among the changes to their preferred XI, and the result is a team in transition. They’ve conceded goals in each of their last five pre-season friendlies, including two against Crystal Palace in the Community Shield.

We’ve been closely monitoring the best bargain-bucket picks with more vigour than David Dickinson at a car boot sale.

Here are the popular budget enablers that may (or may not) play:

Goalkeepers

Martin Dúbravka (Burnley, £4.0m). Dúbravka has joined Burnley and, as such, is the most likely £4.0m goalkeeper to actually start. His yellow flag (due to lack of match fitness) has just been lifted, too.

Defenders

Maxime Estève (Burnley, £4.0m). Another Burnley pick, we’ve been eyeing up Estève ever since the game launched. A reliable centre-back who’s likely to start.

Jaka Bijol (Leeds, £4.0m). Here’s a really smart move. Bijol is suspended for Gameweek 1, so nobody owns him. That’s a good thing for budget players, because if managers don’t own them, managers can’t transfer them out (Remember: too many transfers out = a price drop). Bijol will almost certainly play for Leeds from Gameweek 2, but unlike the likes of Estève, he’s less vulnerable to a drop in price.

Joe Rodon (Leeds, £4.0m). A centre-back who might benefit from occasional Defensive Contribution points, Rodon is expected to start for Leeds.

Midfielders

This is a barren wasteland. Only cockroaches survive in the £4.5m midfielder category this season, and they don’t have a strong FPL record.

There are a few out-on-a-limb picks:

Josh King (Fulham, £4.5m) - Fulham’s Josh King was spotlighted in our midfielder round-up a few weeks back. He started in their pre-season friendlies and even scored in one.

Freddie Potts (West Ham, £4.5m) - West Ham fans like Potts, and the general consensus is that he’ll feature for them more prominently eventually. This season might be too early, but he’s started their last three preseason friendlies.

Forwards

The only viable pick amongst the £4.5m forwards is Marc Guiu. He might well start for Sunderland eventually, but he hasn’t featured in pre-season, and whilst he’s been pictured in training, it's likely that Gameweek 1 will come too soon. He’s got high ownership, which means a price drop could be on the cards.

For those unfamiliar with LazyFPL, the purpose of this section isn’t to predict which player will score the most points each gameweek. That responsibility falls to you, we’re afraid.

Instead, we’re here to tell you who will be the most popular captain. It’s almost always the one you ought to go for if you want to play like the best managers in the world.

This week, it’s probably going to be Mohamed Salah.

Salah has seen a drop in his ownership since his rather dismal performance in the Community Shield, but most managers expect him to maintain his age-old tradition of scoring a stupid number of FPL points in Gameweek 1:

24/25: 14 points
23/24: 12 points
22/23: 12 points
21/22: 17 points
20/21: 20 points
19/20: 12 points

We don’t have much time for superstition in these parts, but you don’t mess with that sort of record.

Let us introduce you to The Professor. His hobbies include analysing stats, learning about game theory and being incredibly dull at dinner parties.

In 11 seasons, he has never finished outside of the top 100k overall (which, these days, is the top 0.9% of managers).

Anyway, here’s his current Gameweek 1 team:

This will almost certainly change. For example, he’s currently banging on about a Bench Boost in Gameweek 2 as we speak, which would prompt some wholesale changes.

To pre-empt any complaints that his team has changed: the only way to get his final team (and the final teams of our other experts) is by joining LazyFPL Premium, where you’ll get live updates through the WhatsApp Broadcast channel.

After all, you can hardly expect a professional tinkerer to lock his team in 24h before the Gameweek 1 deadline.

For reasons unknown to us, Gameweek 1 feels weightier than every other gameweek of the season. But we’ve been around the block a few times, and let us tell you: Gameweek 1 counts just the same as all the others.

Next week’s deadline is another Friday night special, so we’ll be back in your inbox next Thursday evening. Ta-ra for now.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.