⏰ Gameweek 1’s deadline is Friday, 21st August, 18:30 BST ⏰

🤝 Arsenal agree a deal with Aston Villa for Ezri Konsa for £51m [David Ornstein].

🔴 Arteta confirms that Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka are fit enough to be involved against Coventry. “Bruno Guimarães? Let’s see how he is.”

🔵 “Enzo Fernández is a Chelsea player. He’s a top, top player. We’re happy to have him and he’s getting ready for Monday” - Alonso.

📢 Régis Le Bris: “All of our players are available except Adingra.”

👌 James Maddison is fit and ready for Gameweek 1. Dominic Solanke also back in training.

📧 We’ll send a final, free email 3 hours before the Gameweek 1 deadline, filling you in on any last-minute news.

Keep reading for The Professor’s Gameweek 1 team (spoiler: it’s controversial).

Alright?

With all of the foreplay leading up to Gameweek 1, it’s easy to forget that the FPL points we score (and miss out on) in the opening weekend are just as important as the points we score in November, or March, or that weird, janky gameweek that gets wedged between Christmas and New Year.

They all matter equally.

You might feel like the fate of your entire season rests on whether Ipswich can keep a clean sheet against Sunderland this Saturday, but it doesn’t. By the end of the season, your recollections of Gameweek 1 will be like trying to remember what you ate for dinner on holiday last year. There was probably some halloumi, and maybe a lamb chop, but whatever - all you know for certain is that food was, at some point, consumed.

So, for all the FPL advice we’re about to offer, our main piece of advice is this: whether you have an excellent or a disappointing Gameweek 1 (there’s no middle ground in FPL), try not to get too carried away. You’re only 2.63% through the season.

We stand, together, on the precipice of a new season, and despite our irrepressible FPL fatalism, we’re delighted to have you with us. In the immortal words of musician and philosopher Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas, let’s get it started.

Summary for the Lazy: No-Haaland is gathering momentum because of the desire for a strong early Bench Boost. It’s creating a split in approaches.

Forget about Brexit vs Remain, or the Democrats vs the Republicans. The real debate at the heart of our culture right now is how to approach Gameweek 1.

The key split amongst the people who can be arsed to give this much thought is how to use your chips. Some managers are saving their Bench Boosts; others are using theirs within the first few gameweeks.

It might sound pretty trivial (and let’s face it, everything in FPL is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things), but your decision here has knock-on effects for pretty much everything else, from when is best to play your other chips to which players you ought to pick.

We went into depth on this topic in our chip strategy newsletter, but since publishing that, a new counter-cultural movement has emerged. And it involves going without Erling Haaland.

The early Bench Boost and why it impacts Haaland.

It’s becoming an increasingly popular strategy to play the Bench Boost in Gameweeks 1 or 2. What started out as a hipster idea is now mainstream, like Mumford and Sons, or serving burgers on a chopping board.

Because of that, managers following this strategy want extra funds to invest across their whole squads, rather than concentrating most of their budget in their starting XI (as is traditional). In other words, they want a Hench Boost.

This has given rise to the anti-Haaland movement. We’re not quite at placard levels, but y’know, it’s gathering real momentum. The logic is that foregoing Haaland makes it much easier to afford a balanced squad, optimised for the early Bench Boost. They’d then play a Free Hit in Gameweek 3 to bring him in for his home fixture against Coventry.

Plenty of good managers - including several of our Premium pundits - are now seriously considering starting the season without the Norse God.

Is it a good idea?

It’s very hard to assess the viability of this idea because, like everything in FPL, it comes down to what you do instead. Two managers without Haaland can still have wildly different squads.

And thus, we stumble upon the aggravating truth of all this: The question isn’t really Haaland vs no-Haaland at all. It’s the same as it always is: How do we get the most FPL points from our £100m budget?

If you choose to go without Haaland, you still have to make 15 good decisions. The answer to the No-Haaland question boils down to your faith in your ability to put the extra money to better use.

The majority of managers will fall into one of three buckets:

Bucket 1: Early Bench Boost.

Gameweek 1 or 2 - Bench Boost
Gameweek 6 - Wildcard.

A lot of the managers on this strategy are also planning to use their Triple Captains and Free Hits during this window, too. We’ll cover those nearer the time.

Bucket 2: The traditional approach.

Gameweek 6 - Wildcard.
All other chips to be played when it feels right.

Bucket 3: No plans.

Not planning for an early Wildcard. Instead, these managers will save their first Wildcard for when the waters start to get choppy.

All other chips to be played when it feels right.

Most of the proper FPL anoraks in our life (of which there are many) fall into Bucket 1, but it’s hard to know whether that’s because it’s logically the smartest strategy, or because it’s more exciting to spaff all your chips early.

One thing is for certain: The introduction of extra chips last season has, for some managers, turned the opening six gameweeks into a sort of mini-game, particularly given that the value of these chips is nullified in the first half of the season due to the lack of double or blank gameweeks.

As always with Lazy, we’ll keep you informed on conventional chip strategy as we progress through the season.

We can picture the scene. You’ve been invited to your work mini-league. You weren’t even planning on playing this year, yet here you are. Knees weak, arms heavy, and just a day to submit something viable. Mum’s spaghetti.

Whether you’re staring at a blank canvas or just the one vacant slot to fill, we’ve outlined our favourite players at every price point below.

They’re nothing groundbreaking, but they’ll save you from humiliation.

DefCon options are highlighted in yellow, in a tribute to that Coldplay song.

Goalkeepers:

£4.0: N/A
£4.5: Verbruggen, Kinsky
£5.0: Lammens
£5.5: Donnarumma
£6.0: Raya

Defenders:

£4.0: Diop, Davis, Thomas, van Ewijk
£4.5: Shaw, Ajer, Aina
£5.0: Maguire, Muharemović, Canvot, Williams, Ballard
£5.5: Gvardiol, Calafiori, Hill, Collins
£6.0: Virgil
£6.5: O’Reilly
£8.0: Gabriel

References: Our best budget defenders guide and our best mid-priced/premium defenders guide.

Midfielders:

£4.5: Slater, Hemmings
£5.0: I. Sangaré, Gómez
£5.5: Groß, Ampadu, M. Sangaré
£6.0: Ndiaye, Schade, Le Fée
£6.5: Anderson, Sarr, Tzolis
£7.0: Szoboszlai, Foden
£7.5: Wirtz, Rogers
£8.0: Mbeumo
£8.5: Semenyo
£9.5: Palmer
£12.0: Bruno

References: Our best mid-priced midfielders guide and our best premium midfielders guide.

Forwards:

£4.5: N/A
£5.0: Thomas-Asante
£5.5: McBurnie, Barry
£6.0: Calvert-Lewin, Brobbey, Jesus
£6.5: Mateta
£7.0: Šeško
£7.5: Pedro
£8.0: Thiago, Watkins
£9.0: Isak
£15.5: Haaland

References: Our best forwards guide.

Don’t lose yourself in the moment. You’ve got 38 shots, and this opportunity comes plenty of times in a lifetime.

Summary for the Lazy: A player’s expected minutes are even more important than you might think.

It should go without saying, but minutes on the pitch are important in FPL. So important, in fact, that it’s birthed a new, trendy stat amongst the FPL nerds: Expected Minutes (xMins). You’ll probably see xMins rear its head throughout the season, so we’re going to talk about it a little bit here.

If you’re stuck between two players, their xMins is usually the best way to settle the deliberation. Pick the player who has the highest likelihood of playing more minutes. The longer a player is on the pitch, the more likely they are to get attacking returns and DefCon points.

Here are some players with high xMins going into Gameweek 1.

For our Premium readers, there’s an excellent study in the Lazy Academy (chapter 4) that covers the importance of xMins in more depth.

If we had a quid for every time The Professor reminded us that this isn’t his final Gameweek 1 team, we wouldn’t have to bang on about LazyFPL Premium so much.

So yes, a lot could change here. Not all managers have had press conferences yet, transfers are still going through, and Brighton have a game tonight (Thursday).

But we wanted to reveal where his Gameweek 1 team is at right now, because it’s quite fruity.

There’s a glaring omission here, and no, it’s not the absence of Kevin Schade.

Earlier in the newsletter, we mentioned treating the first five or six gameweeks like a mini-game. That’s exactly what The Professor intends to do. He’s already got a Wildcard penned in for Gameweek 6, which means any decisions he makes now only have short-term consequences.

It’s why he’s opting to go without Erling Haaland, and why players like Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Marco Palestra are in. He’s targeting a specific set of fixtures.

As we said up top, lots could change here. Incidentally, this is the first time in LazyFPL history that all five of our expert pundits currently have completely different Gameweek 1 teams.

Summary for the Lazy: It’s Haaland for us.

Erling Haaland will be the most popular captain in Gameweek 1 for his home fixture against Bournemouth, but Bruno Fernandes away at Hull will give him a run for his money.

In our view, if you’re spending £15.5m on Haaland, he ought to be your captain at home against a Bournemouth side that have lost their manager and their busiest centre-back over the summer. Given his ownership at the moment, that should apply to most of you.

If you don’t want to captain him, questions might be raised about his value in your team.

Meanwhile, Bruno might well have one of the easiest fixtures of the season, unless Hull have improved dramatically since their promotion. But the fact he’s playing away from home swings this debate in Haaland’s favour for us.

Even when Bruno himself was asked who to captain, he said Bryan Mbeumo. We rest our case.

But if that doesn’t convince you, perhaps Gandhi’s advice will:

Haaland is the safest pick, but nobody is ridiculing you if you go for Bruno. Anyone other than these two is very much a differential, and should be treated with caution.

Usually we’d have underlying data here, but in lieu of any data, please accept our fixture difficulty analysis instead.

The graphics below are from our Premium fixture tracker, which our team of Premium pundits uses to plan their moves. You can filter by gameweek range, look at cup involvements, identify fixture swings and sort fixture difficulty for attackers vs defenders. Fun fact: One of the pundits actually built it, too.

Here are the teams that have the best attacking and defensive fixtures over the first five gameweeks, according to the tracker:

It’s interesting to note that Arsenal aren’t in the top five for defensive fixtures, but top the attacking list. It’s good news for anyone who’s taken a punt on their attackers, like the £6.5m Christos Tzolis.

Everton are also a surprise inclusion in the defensive fixture rankings - are their defenders being overlooked?

Perhaps most striking of all is Man City’s defensive difficulty. According to our tracker, their opening five fixtures are the best for defenders. The problem, of course, is picking the defenders that are nailed to play all five of those games.

Finally, a note about Brentford. Their attacking fixtures are up there with the very best, and yet Igor Thiago’s popularity is only dropping as we near the Gameweek 1 deadline. He’s one to keep an eye on in these opening weeks.

We’re going to be back in your inbox 3 hours before the Gameweek 1 deadline, because we feel duty-bound to update you on anything that happens between now and then. It’s a one-off.

So, we’ll see you tomorrow for one final briefing before the curtains close. Try to get some sleep tonight - we need you fit and ready for the deadline tomorrow.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.