⏰ Gameweek 2’s deadline is Friday, 28th August, 18:30 BST.

👉 If you missed it, our bonus newsletter from earlier in the week compiles some of the early learnings from Gameweek 1.

🤝 Bradley Barcola will join Liverpool for £100m plus up to £40m of add-ons [Romano].

👋 Ollie Watkins will join Al Hilal [Romano]. Villa will sign Nicolas Jackson from Chelsea for £65m [Ornstein].

➡️ Omar Marmoush joins Spurs on loan. He’s a £7.0m forward.

✍️ Man City complete the signing of Ayyoub Bouaddi for £85m.

👀 Ezri Konsa is “training well and ready to start” - Arteta.

🎙️ Our newest free podcast - the Gameweek 2 preview - is landing here shortly.

👉 Keep reading for The Professor’s Gameweek 2 dilemma.

Alright?

Gameweek 1 was textbook FPL. After all of the deliberation around Erling Haaland vs Bruno Fernandes, their combined score was bested by every starting Hull City defender. Indeed, only three of Gameweek 1’s highest-scoring players cost more than £6.0m.

We are well and truly back.

If you’re new around here, know this: We don’t tend to dwell on the misfortunes of gameweeks past at Lazy HQ. Melancholy is hard work.

But we do like to bathe in the inevitable opportunity that widespread FPL misery presents. Managers tend to make poorer decisions after disappointing gameweeks. It’s why, at the time of writing, nearly 350,000 of them have already sold either Bryan Mbeumo or Bruno ahead of their home fixture against Ipswich.

In this newsletter, we’ll look at what the top managers are doing ahead of Gameweek 2, The Professor’s Gameweek 2 team, captaincy, what to do with your bench, and we’ll try to answer the biggest question of all: Is there anything truly concrete we can learn from one weekend of Premier League football?

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Aside from live scores, commentary, in-game stats, FPL points (including DefCon and bonus), heatmaps, shotmaps and loads more, they’ve just added:

It just keeps getting better. Find out why people thank us when we recommend FotMob, and get it if you don’t have it yet ⬇️

Plenty of Premier League teams were in action during the week. The ones below are from the Carabao Cup (the artist formerly known as the League Cup).

Chelsea and Fulham will play tonight, and Brighton will also play the second part of their Europa Conference League qualifier, but unfortunately for you, we haven’t cracked predicting the future yet (though Morgan Rogers will definitely score. You heard it here first).

Ipswich 3-1 Leicester

£4.5m forward Sindre Walle Egeli scored, which won’t damage his Premier League prospects, and Marcelino Núñez (£5.0m MID) scored a brace.

Plymouth Argyle 2-4 Coventry

New signing Taiwo Awoniyi (£5.5m FWD) scored and assisted.

Stoke 1-1 Hull

Nothing of major note for FPL managers here.

Birmingham 1-6 Brentford

Jaidon Anthony (£6.0m MID) was impressive in this game, bagging three assists. Dango Ouattara started and played the first half. Kevin Schade, Mamadou Sangaré (1 assist) and Igor Thiago (1 goal) were subbed on in the second half. Nathan Collins (the centre-back) scored a brace.

Nottingham Forest 0-2 Leeds

James Justin scored. Dominic Calvert-Lewin was subbed on in the 83rd minute.

Newcastle 3-2 West Brom

Two assists for Amar Dedic (£4.5m DEF) and two goals for Harvey Barnes (£6.0m MID) were the highlights. Malick Thiaw also got an assist.

Spurs 5-1 Charlton Athletic

Lots happened here. £5.0m midfielder Mikey Moore scored and assisted, Dominic Solanke scored, Mateus Fernandes got an assist, and new signing Sávio scored and assisted in a 20-minute cameo. Pedro Porro, the most transferred-out player this gameweek, played 25 minutes.

Preston 0-4 Everton

Thierno Barry scored a hat-trick and got an assist. You heard. He’s a £5.5m forward, but also, it’s Preston. Preston from the Ordinary Boys might’ve put up more of a fight. Brennan Johnson got a goal and an assist in 25 minutes of football.

Summary for the Lazy: He shows lots of promise, but good managers will want clarity on his expected minutes once the transfer window closes.

Maxim De Cuyper tops the leaderboard for FPL points and expected goals. He’s also the most-transferred-in player this week. These are not separate observations.

Is he the real deal? Or was Gameweek 1 a flash in the pan? Here are the arguments for and against, your honour.

The case against owning him.

Three factors are a concern:

1) He’s only playing out of position because of injuries. If Brighton sign a winger, he could quickly lose his OOP status.

2) His main issue is expected minutes. He only played 1,400 minutes last season, and it’s unclear whether he’ll be first-choice once Brighton’s out-and-out wingers return from injury.

3) He plays Chelsea (tough) next, then Leeds (tricky), Coventry (good) and Arsenal (really bloody tough) in his next four.

FPL isn’t won by buying the best points scorer from the previous week. If only it were so simple.

The case for buying him.

1) Ferdi Kadıoğlu is rumoured to leave Brighton, which would strengthen De Cuyper’s place in the team.

2) Even if he loses his role in attacking midfield, he posts good numbers at left-back too (he had 0.36 expected goal involvements per 90 last season). Combined with Brighton’s decent defensive stats, it all bodes well for expected FPL points.

3) Ultimately, he only costs £4.6m. Even if he’s a total flop, it’s not like you have to destroy your team to bring him in.

Our conclusion.

The risk with De Cuyper is whether he’ll regularly play 90 minutes. If he does, he has all the makings of being excellent value.

So, we need more information. Good managers will be watching how the transfer window unfolds, monitoring his minutes, and acting accordingly.

Summary for the Lazy: Excited is a stretch, but here are some players we’re monitoring.

At any other point in the season, it would be weird to look at the performances from an isolated gameweek and draw serious conclusions.

Gameweek 1 is no exception.

Still, it would be remiss of us to gatekeep the players who have made it onto the coveted LazyFPL radar, so here are seven of them. We’re not at Southampton-levels of surveillance, but we’re watching these players with extra scrutiny over the next few gameweeks.

Mamadou Sangaré

Brentford’s new signing was tipped to be really good when he arrived at the club, and lo and behold, he does look really good. He hit DefCon, registered two assists and scored 14 points in his first Premier League game.

Whether he gets regular attacking returns is another question. He was fortunate to get his two assists - they came from just 0.33 expected assists - and his goal threat was pretty much non-existent (he registered 0.05 expected goals).

Still, for £5.6m, you don’t need reliable attacking returns. Sangaré owners might not see too many more double-digit hauls, but he showed all the signs of being a reliable budget midfielder with high DefCon potential.

Jack Hinshelwood

There’s a reason why Cooper, one of our Premium pundits, picked Hinshelwood for his Gameweek 1 team.

Towards the end of last season, he averaged 0.61 expected goal involvements per 90 across 11 games in the No. 10 role.

It’s a trend he’s continued into Gameweek 1 of this season. He only played 63 minutes, but registered 1.41xG in that time. Only De Cuyper had better numbers.

[Last-minute update: Hinshelwood isn’t in tonight’s Conference League squad due to an alleged knock. One to look out for.]

Alexander Isak

Isak owners will rightly feel hard done by that he didn’t return in his first full game in a Liverpool shirt. He should’ve done, at least according to his underlying stats.

He managed 1.09xG - the third-highest of any player in Gameweek 1. Many of his owners expected him to be on penalties, too, but that hope hasn’t completely died. Whilst Dominik Szoboszlai took the penalty in Gameweek 1, it’s not clear whether he’ll always be on penalties or whether he just took that one because it happened to be in the 95th minute against Isak’s former club.

Yoane Wissa

Wissa has proven FPL pedigree, which makes him interesting. It wasn’t just his expected attacking output in Gameweek 1 (1.00xG) that piqued our interest, but his all-round performance. He passed the eye test, and we ain’t talking about Specsavers.

Kevin Schade

The smooth operator operated very smoothly on Brentford’s left wing, and was unfortunate not to get an assist for the penalty he won. He also amassed 0.52xG in Gameweek 1. Three points wasn’t the reward his owners wanted, but his performance showed enough promise to keep them excited.

Cole Palmer

The debate surrounding Palmer in preseason was whether last season’s underwhelming performances would bleed into the 26/27 campaign.

Sound the “it’s only one game” klaxon, but he looked back to his best in Gameweek 1. If “peak Palmer” is back, we’ll need to start making accommodations for him sooner rather than later.

Josh King

Fulham’s £5.5m midfielder had moments of excellence last season, and started his 26/27 campaign with a goal. His stats (0.21 expected goal involvements) were hardly phenomenal, but he was also playing Chelsea.

Fulham assets become particularly interesting after Gameweek 5, when they play all three of the newly promoted teams in a row. If he continues to look good, he could become a strong contender for a budget Wildcard pick over the international break.

Summary for the Lazy: If you’re truly torn between who to start and who to bench, use this system.

We get it, you stacked your bench in Gameweek 1. Adama Traoré would struggle to lift this thing. But now you’ve got a problem. How do you choose which players to bench and which to include in your starting XI?

Firstly, a high-scoring bench isn’t a bad thing. Contrary to popular belief, it’s the best possible outcome once the deadline has passed.

Let’s reason it out. Once the deadline passes, only two things can happen:

Scenario 1: Your starting XI scores Y points. Your bench does sod all. You still have Y points.

Scenario 2: Your starting XI scores Y points. Your bench players score some points. You still have Y points.

The outcome is identical in both scenarios, but in scenario 2, you already own players that could become desirable. Congrats: You can pick good FPL players. Call us mental, but that probably bodes well for the rest of your season.

How do you pick the right players to start?

When we’re torn over which players to bench and which to start, it’s usually because we’ve decided that their fixtures and form are too close to call.

In those instances, we look at the following criteria:

1) Home advantage. Pick the player who plays at home.

2) Expected minutes. Which player is more likely to get 90 minutes?

3) Penalties and set pieces. Does one get more set pieces than the other?

4) Position. A forward scores fewer points for a goal than a midfielder.

5) DefCon. If one player is more likely to get defensive contributions, he’s a safer pick.

Shocking as it’ll be to hear, picking your bench is not an exact science, and anything can happen in a single gameweek. Penalties are missed, red cards are shown. But using a system like this is the best way to ensure that, across the course of the season, you’re lucky more often than not.

Summary for the Lazy: It’s Bruno Fernandes.

Bruno Fernandes is who we would’ve captained this gameweek if, for some perverse reason, we were forced to lock in all of our captains prior to the season getting underway.

The fact he - and Man United - failed to score against Hull shouldn’t deter us from sticking to that plan. He has the best fixture amongst the potential captaincy candidates by some margin, and he’s on penalties. We also expect him to be the most popular captain in Gameweek 2.

Erling Haaland presents the next-best alternative. If you own him and not Bruno, you ought to be captaining the Norse God away at Crystal Palace. He’s scored eight goals in five Premier League games against them.

But Bruno is our pick. Don’t fall victim to recency bias: If you own him, it’s because you believed a week ago that he’d return in this game.

The Professor’s main issue going into Gameweek 2 is Chelsea’s Marco Palestra. He had a great preseason for Chelsea, and looked like he would be the most attacking wingback for Chelsea in Xabi Alonso’s 3-4-3 formation.

Palestra featured in Chelsea’s training videos and pictures before Gameweek 1, and Alonso never mentioned any sort of injury during his pre-match press conference.

Then, on Monday night, he was nowhere to be seen in the squad that faced Fulham.

It’s a predicament, not least because reports this week are ominous about his chances of starting Gameweek 2.

So, with everything currently stacked against Palestra as an FPL pick, what is The Prof doing with him?

Nothing. Nothing at all. Here’s his team going into Gameweek 2:

As The Prof discussed before Gameweek 1, he built his squad with a strong bench specifically to weather injuries, suspensions, random acts of disappearing, and everything else that FPL can throw at you. His biggest priority is to hoard free transfers, like some sort of crazed fantasy football prepper.

This is what good FPL managers do. They don’t panic and abandon their strategy at the first sign of adversity.

Chelsea’s attack also looked excellent against Fulham. If Palestra returns in time for Hull (H) in Gameweek 4, the reasons for selecting him may quickly become relevant again.

Last week, it was revealed just before the Gameweek 1 deadline that Kai Havertz and Bukayo Saka were starting against Coventry.

LazyFPL Premium members got this info the moment it broke because of the WhatsApp Broadcast channel, where we share need-to-know info in real time.

If any Man City news breaks before the Gameweek 2 deadline, that’s where to find it.

Aside from this huge advantage, Premium members also get our experts’ Gameweek 2 team reveals, regular podcasts, extra newsletters and loads more.

There’s a reason why over 92% of our members improve at FPL once they join.

Right, Gameweek 3 is another Friday night kick-off, so we’ll be back in your inbox 24 hours before that.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.