🚨 GW6: Your FPL cheat sheet 🧠

⏰ Gameweek 6’s deadline is Saturday, 27th September, 11:00 BST ⏰

🤦 Cole Palmer is rumoured to be out for 3-6 weeks due to his ongoing groin injury (Simon Phillips).

🙄 Erling Haaland is yellow-flagged, but was pictured in training on Thursday.

🟥 Hugo Ekitike picked up a red card in the Carabao Cup, essentially guaranteeing an Alexander Isak start vs Crystal Palace.

🏥 Noni Madueke is likely to be out for 6-8 weeks.

🍟 A significant number of managers are expected to play a chip this week, including the Professor. We’ll run through your options.

✍️ We’re still trying to improve our key stats section. If you have a second, please fill out this quick form. And cheers to those of you who have already done it.

👀 Keep reading for a Gameweek 6 Wildcard draft.

Alright?

Make no mistake: A lot of good FPL managers are treating Gameweek 6 like a fork in the road.

Choose one way, and it’s misery, sorrow and despair.

Choose the other way, and it’s also misery, sorrow and despair. But maybe slightly less of it.

Which, for some of you, might be a bit odd. On first glance, Gameweek 6 looks innocent enough. 10 fixtures, every team present, nothing to see here, officer.

But just like that dodgy greengrocer up the road that never actually sells any veg, things aren’t quite what they seem. Bubbling underneath the surface is something far more menacing.

Here’s everything you need to know about Gameweek 6. Trigger warning: It’s a Wildcard special, so a little longer than usual.

We’ve mentioned Fotmob a few times here and, every time we do, we get at least one reply saying words to the effect of “Cheers for letting me know”.

If you play FPL (weird if you don’t, given where you are), you should have FotMob on your phone. It’s the easiest way to keep up with live scores and see how your players are doing.

Here are three things we love about it:

1) It has a ‘Fantasy’ toggle.

It shows you everyone’s score in one place, instantly. No more clicking through players on the FPL site. It’s the fastest way to see who’s hauling (nobody you own) and who’s blanking (everyone you own).

2) It’s ridiculously good for stats.

You get the classics like xG and xA, the matchday stuff like shots on target and key passes, plus extras like heat maps and shot maps. It’s the kind of thing you can happily lose half an hour scrolling through, and honestly, you could run your FPL team on this data alone.

3) The alerts are perfect for FPL.

You can follow individual players and get pinged for goals, assists, yellow cards, subs and more, so you’ll know straight away when your picks are involved.

Best of all, FotMob is completely free. You can use it on desktop or grab the app, and you can join with one click below:

Lazy summary: Wait for news. If we don’t get any, assume he’ll be fine.

The tantalising prospect of Erling Haaland playing against Burnley at home has been tarnished by a yellow stain, and not the sort you find on hotel sheets.

Without overstating his importance too much, it’s mostly about Haaland this gameweek. Wildcards are being activated to bring him in, and Triple Captains are being played to capitalise on perhaps his easiest fixture this side of Christmas.

So the yellow flag is a bit of a buzzkill.

What do we know?

At the time of writing, not a lot. Haaland was withdrawn in Gameweek 5 due to back pain, and this remains the concern. Pep Guardiola, usually honest and open with his player news, was uncharacteristically ambiguous in the midweek press conference on Wednesday: “Tomorrow [i.e. Thursday], we’ll see”.

Well, we saw Haaland pictured in full training on Thursday, which is a promising sign, but not a conclusive one.

It’s all eyes on the pre-weekend press conference for an update, which takes place at 12:30 BST on Friday.

Should it change your plans?

We consulted the LazyFPL brain trust, and the consensus was “it’s probably fine, but let’s scrape together as much info as we can prior to the deadline”. It’s going to be a wait-and-see. There might be a team leak, there might be some clarification from Pep. We’ll share it all as it happens on the LazyFPL Premium Broadcast chat.

Assuming we hear nothing, we’d advise proceeding as normal. Assume that Haaland will start and play unless told otherwise.

Lazy summary: Wildcards if you don’t own Haaland. Triple captains if you do.

Tensions are high this week. Tensions are always high when chips are on the menu, which is why there are always fights in McDonald’s.

Gameweek 6 will likely see the largest number of chips played in a single gameweek so far this season. Two, in particular, are currently bubbling away in the fryer of conventional wisdom: The Wildcard & The Triple Captain.

As the fourth commandment of the ancient FPL texts explains, thou shalt only play one chip per gameweek. Which leaves managers having to do the unthinkable: make a decision for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances.

A brief breakdown of both:

🃏 The Wildcard

The most compelling argument for the Wildcard is that it means you can bring in Erling Haaland without causing total destruction to your team. It also capitalises on a couple of fixture swings, namely Arsenal, Spurs and Man City.

🧢 The Triple Captain

This was a lot more compelling before Erling Haaland was a doubt for Gameweek 6, but if he does start, Burnley at home is likely his best fixture this side of Christmas.

The big difference between these two is that Wildcards cannot be cancelled, but Triple Captains can. So, regardless of Haaland’s injury status, Wildcards that have already been activated will remain activated.

We’ll talk about the optimal Wildcard team momentarily. We’ll talk about whether to play your Triple Captain in the captaincy section.

This was a popular segment when we did it in pre-season, and we’re never ones to turn down an easy opportunity for cheap plaudits.

If you’re playing your Wildcard this week, here’s a table of our suggested players if you’re searching for DBS (Decent But Sensible)-checked options.

We’ve given you a table, but nothing hits those dopamine receptors quite like an actual team. Here are two of ‘em:

The Haaland/Salah Draft

This is probably the most rounded draft you can get with both Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah. Btw, “rounded” is FPL manager parlance for “not shit”.

The morale of this draft is that it’s hard to have both Erling and Mo without making big sacrifices elsewhere.

That said, it still includes three DEFCON magnets, Bruno Fernandes, and the best of the budget players in Martin Dúbravka, Steve Estève (not his real name), Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Tijani Reijnders and Lyle Foster.

The LazyFPL draft

The LazyFPL braintrust put their heads together and nearly conjured enough cerebral power to equal that of an average manager. This was the team we came up with.

We were left with £0.5m in the bank, so even if you're not quite as wealthy as us, you should still be able to afford it.

It has triple Arsenal, to really capitalise on their fixture swing, and three of the defenders (James Tarkowski, Marcos Senesi, Joachim Andersen) have been picked for their remarkably consistent defensive contributions.

If you hate it, that’s great: Build your own. But heck, it might provide some inspiration.

Lazy summary: Foden, Saka, Tarkowski, Minteh, Donnarumma.

Listen, we don’t like differentials this early. They’re ill-advised if your main aim this season is to finish with a respectable overall rank.

But even if we try to illegalise them, you’re going to choose some anyway. At least now we can regulate and control where they come from.

Phil Foden

Foden, like all Man City attackers (apart from Haaland, perhaps), is a dangerous pick, and not in the good way. But he’s started the last three games and has scored in two of them (including their midweek fixture against Huddersfield).

Alternatives (like Omar Marmoush and Rayan Cherki) are injured, which gives him about as much safety as a Man City attacker can have (which, disclaimer, ain’t much).

Bukayo Saka

Noni Madueke’s injury is the latest in a list of reasons to consider buying Saka. The other reasons in that list are variations of “he’s a very good player”.

He may have lost penalties to Viktor Gyökeres, but from Gameweek 7, Arsenal’s fixtures turn more golden than a Greggs sausage roll, and Saka remains Arsenal’s talisman. He’s also £0.2m cheaper than he was in Gameweek 1.

James Tarkowski

He's registered defensive contributions in every game so far, and Jarrad Branthwaite is close to a return for Everton, which generally means more clean sheets for The Toffees.

Then there’s his set-piece threat. Tarkowski has been a magnet for Everton set pieces over the season, and Everton currently sit second for expected goals via set pieces, too.

Yankuba Minteh

There’s a segment of FPL hipsters who have owned Minteh since Gameweek 1. They were talking about him whilst he was still playing underground gigs in Peckham. He started slow, but a goal and an assist over his last few games have reminded us that he can translate consistently good performances into FPL points.

Brighton also have a nice fixture run after Chelsea this weekend in all.

Gianluigi Donnarumma

A cheap, reliable and excessively tall way into an impressive-looking Man City defence, the only reason why Donnarumma isn’t owned by more managers is that he joined the league late.

There were more midweek games this week. The only real casualty was Hugo Ekitike, whose careless red card opens the door for Alexander Isak this weekend.

Here’s a quick summary of the biggest talking points:

EFL Cup ☕️

The big news came from the Liverpool game. Alexander Isak started (and scored) before his replacement, Hugo Ekitike, also scored, and then got a second yellow for taking off his shirt during the celebration. He’ll miss Gameweek 6 as a result.

Brighton beat Barnsley 0-6, with winger Diego Gómez (£4.9m MID) scoring four goals. He hasn’t had many minutes in the Premier League yet this season, but might that change?

Elsewhere, Spurs beat Doncaster 3-0, Man City won 2-0 at Huddersfield (with Phil Foden getting a goal and an assist), and Arsenal beat Port Vale 0-2. Bukayo Saka started alongside Eberechi Eze (who scored).

European football 🇪🇺

Nottingham Forest’s new striker, Igor Jesus, scored a brace away at Real Betis, adding further threat to Chris Wood’s status as a starting forward.

Aston Villa won 1-0 against Bologna. John McGinn got the goal. Donyell Malen started ahead of Ollie Watkins upfront - Watkins was later subbed on and missed a penalty.

Lazy summary: Everything points to a sell, and “but it’s Salah” isn’t enough.

Mohamed Salah is the second-most transferred out player this week, and almost certainly would’ve been top if not for his colleague, Hugo Ekitike, getting sent off.

His performances haven’t looked good, and, uncharacteristically for Salah, his stats haven’t been good either.

It doesn’t really matter what attacking metric you’re looking at: shots, expected goals, expected goal involvements: Salah is nowhere near the top 10 for any of ‘em.

If we strip away what we know about the Egyptian, for a second, and judge him purely on the evidence of this season, the decision would be easy: Salah is not playing well enough to justify his hefty price tag.

But this is FPL, and things are never that simple. There’s a nagging sense amongst all of us that, regardless of his performances so far, he has the capability to turn that around. We saw a glimpse of that in his performance in the Champions League last week, in which he scored, assisted and hit the inside of the post.

Clearly, Salah has not lost his ability to be a great FPL asset. He just hasn’t demonstrated it in the Premier League yet this season.

But plenty of leagues were lost last season because managers kept Erling Haaland and Cole Palmer for too long. Assessing a player’s ability by their historical data is a dangerous game, particularly if everything else points to a sell.

Lazy Summary: It’s Erling Haaland.

If he plays, and you own him, you captain Erling Haaland. At the moment, with the current information available to us, he gets our armband.

We’d also recommend the Triple Captain, but as we’ve already said in this newsletter, a lot of this hinges on Pep’s comments.

Why should you Triple Captain Haaland this week?

Haaland is in form at the moment. He’s scored 11 goals in his last six games (though five were against Moldova). At some point, later in the season, he might not be in form.

Also, Burnley aren’t good (cutting-edge analysis, we know). No team has a higher expected goals conceded this season than the newly promoted side.

Best player vs worst defence = Triple Captain. Easy game.

We also like that a lot of good managers (including the Professor) are playing a Wildcard this week, which reduces the number of them that can Triple Captain him.

Sound the siren, bang the gong: The Professor is playing his Wildcard.

Amongst the less conventional considerations are Phil Foden, Bryan Mbeumo and Bukayo Saka, and those final decisions may be determined by early team news or some press conference clarity.

Meanwhile, James Cooper (our resident Hall of Fame manager) is going to Wildcard in Gameweek 6 ahead of a planned Bench Boost in Gameweek 7, so his team looks different to the normal Wildcard templates doing the rounds.

You can view both of their teams, plus the teams of our other resident experts, by joining LazyFPL Premium.

Thanks to all of you who have filled out this survey already. We’re going to do one more round of responses before we implement some improvements to this section, so please do take a moment to fill it out if you haven’t yet:

Gameweek 7 has a Friday evening deadline if you’re in the UK, so we’ll be back on Thursday with what will hopefully be a slightly smaller newsletter.

…but we’re not making any promises.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.