🚨 GW5: Your 4-min cheat sheet 🤫

⏰ Gameweek 5’s deadline is Saturday, 20th September, 11:00 BST ⏰

👀 Alexander Isak starts and plays 58 minutes in the UCL.

🤕 Yoanne Wissa is out for 5-6 weeks.

🚫 Aaron Wan-Bissaka will miss Gameweek 5 with injury.

✍️ We’re trying to improve our key stats section. If you have a second, please fill out this quick form.

🤯 Keep reading to learn why there could be a Double Gameweek before Christmas.

Alright?

Most FPL managers will experience the five stages of grief during the first five gameweeks:

GW1 - Hope. Don’t stop believin’.
GW2 - Resolve. I get knocked down, but I get up again.
GW3 - Anger. I am still just a rat in a cage.
GW4 - Sadness. Please, please, please, let me get what I want.
GW5 - Acceptance. Don't think twice, it's all right.

By this time next week, you’ll be so stoic it’ll make Marcus Aurelius look like an overthinker.

But before that, we’ve got a weekend of football to navigate. Not since May 2023 have the bookies predicted so few goals in a single gameweek, so we’re probably in for a cracker.

Here’s everything you need to know ahead of Gameweek 5.

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Casting an eye over your FPL team at the moment might feel like looking at your old Myspace page: A shrine to poor decision-making and your lack of ability to pick the right people.

But fear not: Here’s a statistical look at some highly-owned players currently on thin ice.

Ollie Watkins

Watkins has 1.3 expected goal involvements (xGI) this season, which means that, whilst he ought to have scored more than his 8 points across four games, he hasn’t exactly lived up to his pre-season interview about why managers should pick him either:

But he has Sunderland (A), Fulham (H) and Burnley (H) next. It feels like the wrong time to finally lose patience. If some perverse lunatic put a gun to our head and forced us to sell or keep, for reasons we can’t even fathom, we’d scream “keep” and then ask why the hell it matters so much.

Florian Wirtz

Wirtz is clearly a good player, and he’s starting every game for Liverpool.

But just like Shakira’s hips, the stats allegedly don’t lie, and Wirtz’s stats are hardly perfection.

Wirtz is averaging 0.33 expected goal involvements per 90 (for context, Antoine Semenyo is posting 0.72, and Jack Grealish is posting 0.63). Whilst he always looks good, his performances aren’t converting to FPL points. He’ll come good in time, but there are probably better ways to spend £8.3m.

Nottingham Forest players

If you put a 10p into the Professor (we won’t say where you have to put it), he’ll dutifully spit out facts about why Nottingham Forest’s 24/25 campaign was so statistically freakish. According to Understat, they overperformed their expected points last season by a staggering 14.99 (which, in layman’s terms, is 15).

So it’s of little surprise that we’re seeing some regression this season. It’s not that Forest are suddenly bad, it’s that they’re playing to their means again.

Postecoglou’s new recruits are one of the most defensively fragile teams so far this season (both in terms of expected and actual goals conceded), and it’s not exactly rosy at the other end either. Only five teams (the three promoted sides, plus Villa and Wolves) have a lower xG than Nottingham Forest after four games.

Burnley and Sunderland come next, so it’d be silly to get rid now, but they’ll need to improve under Ange to see ownership beyond that.

Lazy Summary: His stats have been abysmal, but he can probably still play football.

If you exclude his penalty in Gameweek 4, Mohamed Salah only has 0.31xG and 0.5xA so far this season. However you spin it, his owners have been lucky so far.

There are two narratives here:

1) Salah isn’t the player he used to be. Sooner or later, his luck will run out.

2) Salah is proving that even when he doesn’t play well, he still returns points. Imagine what’ll happen when he finds his form again.

In the 89th minute of Liverpool vs Burnley, we’d wager that 90% of his owners were in the first camp, convinced that this season would finally be his regression year.

But a last-minute penalty in that game, followed by a man of the match performance in the UCL midweek (in which he scored and assisted, created three chances and hit the post), has helped to remind us that, shock horror, the Premier League’s greatest goalscorer can still play football competently.

Now is not the time to get rid of him. If you’ve weathered his first four fixtures, you ought to keep him (and captain him, if you want to play like top managers play) for Everton at home. Let’s not forget, he’s still the fifth-highest scoring midfielder.

Erling Haaland faces Burnley (H) in Gameweek 6, and plenty of managers will need to sell Salah to afford him. But let’s see what happens in Gameweek 5 first, shall we?

Lazy Summary: There’s an unlikely, but not impossible, chance of a small Blank Gameweek (and subsequent Double Gameweek) before Christmas.

Of all the midweek games that took place over the last four days, it’s unlikely you were cancelling plans to watch Crystal Palace edge out Millwall on pens.

But, in a strange twist of fate, that game was almost certainly the most important for FPL managers.

The permutations here are complex and unlikely to bear fruit, but in short, because Crystal Palace are competing in the Conference League, if they also get to the EFL Cup quarter-finals, they’ll have a fixture clash, because Matchday 6 of the Conference League is due to take place during the EFL Cup quarter-finals.

That would mean the only way to ensure Crystal Palace get to play their EFL Cup quarter-final before the semi-finals is to cancel one of their Premier League fixtures instead.

Following? Good, because it gets more complicated.

If a Premier League fixture is cancelled, it obviously needs to be rescheduled. For Palace, this rescheduling can’t happen in the first half of the season. But their EFL Cup quarter-final opponents, who this disruption will also impact, might have a window in Gameweek 16 for a potential reschedule.

So, here’s what needs to happen for a potential Blank/Double Gameweek this side of Christmas:

1) Crystal Palace need to actually reach the quarter-finals of the EFL Cup. That’s already a stretch.

2) They need to be playing another Premier League team in the quarter-finals, meaning that team’s Premier League fixture is disrupted too.

3) That Premier League team - and their would-be opponents - would need to have a window to play their rescheduled fixture before Christmas (Ben Crellin thinks Gameweek 16 is the most likely).

If you’ve got a headache, don’t worry. This isn’t something we can plan for yet, and if it becomes a more serious possibility, we’ll give you plenty of notice.

For now, at least, you can bamboozle your mini-league rivals with vague references to the possibility of it.

Not the salty, greasy type of takeaways, we’re afraid.

There were quite a lot of midweek games taking place. Here’s what happened, in case you didn’t cancel your midweek plans to watch them all:

EFL Cup ☕️

Crystal Palace beat Millwall on pens, which keeps the vague possibility of a Blank and Double Gameweek before Christmas alive. We’ve discussed this already. Glasner mentioned that Jean-Philippe Mateta probably needs a rest, so he played him for the full 90.

Meanwhile, Brentford knocked out Aston Villa on penalties. Harvey Elliott scored for Villa, and given how hard it is for anyone to score for Villa at the moment, that’s pretty good going. An experimental Nottingham Forest side lost 3-2 to Swansea City.

Champions League 🏆

Arsenal and Spurs both won and kept clean sheets on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, Cole Palmer played the full 90 and scored in Chelsea's 3-1 defeat to Bayern Munich. He felt his groin (NSFW pic below) but Maresca has confirmed he’s okay.

We’ve already mentioned Mohamed Salah’s MOTM performance against Atletico Madrid. Alexander Isak started ahead of Hugo Ekitike and played 58 minutes, with Cody Gakpo also starting.

Thursday saw Man City and Newcastle play. Erling Haaland and Jeremy Doku scored for Man City in a 2-0 win against a 10-man Napoli. Phil Foden created 8 chances in that game, btw. Madness. Newcastle lost 1-2 to Barcelona. Anthony Gordon scored.

Lazy Summary: Early signs point to bad news for Ekitike, but he’s probably fine for GW5. Slot certainly has options.

Alexander Isak started his first game in a Liverpool shirt on Wednesday. Slot has been careful to stress that his minutes will be managed, and, after being subbed after 58 minutes against Atletico, the sense amongst Liverpool fans is that whilst Isak could feature against Everton, he’s unlikely to start the game.

His midweek cameo did give us a glimpse into how Liverpool might line up when he does start, though, and it’s good news for Cody Gakpo owners and bad news for Hugo Ekitike fans. It was the Dutchman who got the nod on the left, which isn’t surprising, because y’know, he always plays there.

And Slot’s comments after the game seemed to reaffirm this. “In general I think both of them [Isak and Ekitike] are more No. 9s than any other position. Hugo could be a player who could play off the left side, not in the way Cody or Mo is playing, but he could become a second striker.”

So, it looks increasingly likely that Slot would need to change his current system to accommodate both Ekitike and Isak on the same pitch, which feels like more of a stretch than him just picking one over the other.

Ekitike should probably be held for Gameweek 5, but his days in your team will surely need to be numbered as Isak returns to match fitness.

Lazy Summary: The boffins have checked, and it’s a no.

Now that ‘tis the season for regular midweek games, we feel we owe it to you to briefly touch on one of the most widely distributed myths in pub-based parlance: That playing fixtures midweek impacts Premier League performance at the weekend.

Luckily, there’s a surprising amount of academia around this topic, and the overarching conclusions are categorical: There isn’t really any impact at all. Sure, some individual teams might suffer from the congestion, but as a general rule, it makes no difference.

If you’re feeling uncharacteristically unlazy, you can read research papers about it here and here. The former actually goes further, suggesting that teams playing in European and domestic competitions concurrently actually perform better.

Lazy Summary: It’s Mohamed Salah.

Those who have played FPL for a few seasons will already be familiar with Gandhi’s famous words:

And whilst this adage is vindicated time and time again, Mohamed Salah vs Everton in the early kick-off gets our armband nod.

It’s a triple-threat of logic:

1) Salah is still capable of scoring FPL points. Particularly at home against Everton.

2) There’s a shortage of other good options.

3) As lazy managers, we have no time for childish superstitions.

He’s the bookies’ favourite to score, and he’s the best captain if you’re playing it safe.

The Professor had a rocky Gameweek 4 - and not in the Stallone-punching-meat sense of the word.

But in the style that has earned him his reputation as one of the more formidable managers on Earth, he’s doing what he does best: nothing at all.

As he wrote in his last premium email, Gameweek 5 feels like the calm before the storm. Next week, he anticipates that a lot of Wildcards and Free Hits will be played. But this week? Learn more, stay patient, roll a transfer.

Here’s his team:

As a reminder, we’re looking to improve this section, and your feedback is the thing that will determine how we approach those improvements.

It’s sort of like voting in a general election, only this vote might actually impact your life.

It’s another Saturday morning deadline next week, so you can expect to see us at the usual appointment time next Friday.

Enjoy the football? Fat chance, but hey, there’s no harm in trying.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.