🧠 Building your FPL team: Part 1.

🏆 25 days to go until Gameweek 1. Join our free mini-league here.

🤝 Arsenal sign left-winger Christos Tzolis from Club Brugge.

🤦‍♂️ Popular budget midfielder James Garner undergoes groin surgery and will be a doubt for Gameweek 1.

🔵 Chelsea and Crystal Palace agree a deal to sign £6.0m defender Maxence Lacroix [David Ornstein].

⬆️ Upgrade to LazyFPL Premium and get your first month for £1.

Alright?

Welcome to FPL Managers Anonymous. This is a safe space, where we’d encourage you to be open and honest with the group.

So, how many Gameweek 1 drafts have you created and discarded so far? Have you started looking at James Maddison yet? Why are you dreaming about Dominic Szoboszlai free-kicks?

Take our cold, disembodied hand, and repeat after us: “It’s okay to be thinking about Gameweek 1 in July.”

In this newsletter, we dissect some of the emerging trends ahead of Gameweek 1. From the sudden popularity of Cristhian Mosquera to the curious flirtation with the Bench Boost in the opening week, it’s all here.

Our Premium pundits are sort of like the Avengers of fantasy football. Between them they have:

👑 1 Overall FPL Champion (blimey)
🏆 5 top 1k finishes
⭐ 11 top 5k finishes
🔥 7 top 10k finishes
🎯 15 top 25k finishes
📈 16 top 50k finishes
💯 7 top 100k finishes

That’s right, we now have a former winner in our ranks, joining a data-specialist, a differential hunter, a fixture targeter, a hall-of-famer and, of course, The Professor.

They’ve all built their Gameweek 1 teams, and if you join LazyFPL Premium, you can see them immediately. The first month is just £1:

Remember, you’ll also get a regular podcast (daily episodes throughout August), access to our Premium mini-leagues, extra newsletters, the WhatsApp news channel, the LazyFPL Academy and loads more. Over 99% of our members say it’s good value for money.

Lazy summary: We’re pretty boring, but that’s how you win more often than not in FPL.

Before we get into the meat of the Gameweek 1 template, it would be remiss of us not to discuss our FPL philosophy, which informs virtually all of our pre-season advice.

It’s not necessarily the “right” philosophy - some naysayers would call it boring - but it’s the most popular managerial style amongst the top managers in the game, which means it ought to be good enough for us.

At LazyFPL, we avoid any maverick decisions in Gameweek 1. Whilst some managers relish the opportunity to pick and captain differentials, to play their chips early, to go against the grain, we preach a measured, sensible approach. Your ability to plan ahead and reduce your exposure to risk is far more important than your ability to captain a 3% owned midfielder.

That means:

This approach extends throughout most of the season, though the final sprint (which starts around Gameweek 32) introduces some new tactics. We’ll cover those nearer the time.

It isn’t possible to build the team below with £100m, so calm yourself down. We’ve built it for illustrative purposes to show you the most popular players in each position. It felt like a more interesting way to do it than a list.

The early popularity of some players was always inevitable. At the time of carving these words into the Earth’s crust, Erling Haaland is 74.6% owned. Bruno Fernandes is just shy of 50% owned. This could’ve been predicted long before the game launched.

But some of the most sought-after players are less obvious. A few might be outright perplexing. Let’s take a closer look.

Cristhian Mosquera (16.5% owned)

Mosquera plays third fiddle to Gabriel and William Saliba, who are currently Arsenal’s first and second-choice fiddlers.

But Saliba has a back injury and is expected to be out until around December. Mosquera is favourite to replace him. At £5.5m, he’s an affordable way into Arsenal’s defence.

Lazy verdict: A good pick if he starts. The Community Shield will be the clearest indication of Arteta’s plans for Saliba’s absence. If Mosquera starts in that, expect his ownership to rocket.

Senne Lammens (20.1% owned)

FPL managers weren’t exactly falling over themselves to buy Man United’s goalkeeper last season, but right now, he’s the third-most popular goalkeeper in the game (behind David Raya and Martin Dúbravka).

This is for two reasons: his price (he’s £5.0m, which is reasonable) and his fixtures (he plays Hull away, Ipswich at home, and Everton away in Gameweeks 1, 2, and 3). Luke Shaw (£4.5m) is popular for the same reasons.

Lazy verdict: A decent pick in the short-term, but his fixtures turn after GW3.

Morgan Rogers (34.1% owned)

Don’t get us wrong, Mr Rogers is clearly a good player, but some pundits are surprised that he’s the third-most popular midfielder in the game at present.

This tends to happen whenever a high-profile, big-money signing occurs, and it’s happened here.

Lazy verdict: Rogers is a solid FPL pick, but his popularity has been enhanced by his move to Chelsea. We’d advise waiting to see how he does at his new club.

Dominic Szoboszlai (44.3% owned)

Another good player who deserves attention. Szoboszlai is a Hungarian Army knife of a player: He’s on set-pieces, could well be on penalties and is as nailed to start as anyone in that Liverpool side. With his ability to get DefCon points, he has plenty of ways to score points.

But the size of his ownership is still surprising. He has more than double the ownership of Antoine Semenyo (who scored 42 points more last season), and four times that of Morgan Gibbs-White (who also outscored him in the 25/26 campaign).

Lazy verdict: You could do a lot worse than Szoboszlai, but he overperformed his xG (expected goals) and his xA (expected assists) last season. More likely to drip-feed points than register emphatic returns.

Lazy summary: Diop and van Ewijk are both over 15% owned, but should be approached with caution.

£4.0m defenders are the Rolled Steel Joists of your team. If you want expensive players who score points, you need these trusty girders to hold everything in place.

There are two £4.0m defenders, Issa Diop and Milan van Ewijk, who are head-and-shoulders above the rest (in terms of ownership, not shampoo preference).

But before we explore their viability, a word of caution: Popular £4.0m defenders are high-risk. That’s because the more popular a player is to begin with, the more vulnerable he is to dropping in price. And once a player drops below £4.0m, it’s an extra pain in the arse to replace him.

Issa Diop (21% owned)

A summer signing for Ipswich, Diop brings plenty of Premier League experience to the newly promoted side, and arrives off the back of a decent World Cup with Morocco.

He barely played for West Ham last season - mostly owing to injury - but he’s expected to feature prominently for Ipswich in the 26/27 campaign.

Lazy verdict: His high ownership makes him more of a price-drop risk, but he may drip-feed DefCon returns. Don’t expect many clean sheets.

Milan van Ewijk (17% owned)

The fact that Coventry City themselves are pushing van Ewijk as an FPL asset should tell you something about why he’s currently 17% owned.

Nine assists last season is impressive, but it’s highly unlikely that he’ll enjoy those attacking freedoms in the Premier League.

The best thing he has going for him is a “van” in his name. One of Lazy’s golden rules is that if you’re a defender with a “van” in your name, you’re immediately world-class.

Lazy verdict: Coventry conceded the fewest goals in the Championship last season, but we should take any defensive or attacking stats for newly promoted sides with a pinch of salt big enough for Salt Bae himself. Don’t expect big things from van Ewijk.

In our next newsletter, we’ll look at some of the lesser-owned budget defenders we reckon can do a job.

Lazy summary: A contrarian tactic, but it can be used to great effect if executed properly.

For the last two seasons (since FPL Towers started giving us extra chips), FPL hipsters have enjoyed telling everyone that they’re Bench Boosting in Gameweek 1. They’re titillated by the very possibility. It’s naughty. It’s diabolical.

It’s a bit like telling everyone you’re going to run an ultra marathon in 2028. You obviously won’t, but talking about it is usually enough to make you feel like you’ve sort of done it already.

The logic touted by these hipsters is simple - players are rested, we get free rein to build a team precisely for a Bench Boost, and there won’t be a Double Gameweek before Christmas. So why not Gameweek 1?

Look, one of our Premium pundits played his Bench Boost in Gameweek 1 last season and finished in the top 10k, so who are we to say it’s a bad idea?

Bad idea or not, one thing is certain: It’s not by-the-book. Most managers prefer to get a lay of the land before they start using their chips. If you are going to use yours, you’ll need a strong bias towards players who are ensured of a start.

Lazy summary: Your Wildcard strategy determines how far in advance you need to plan ahead. Gameweek 6 is the most popular target at the moment.

There’s one chip that does matter at this stage: Your Wildcard.

Even if, for some perverse reason, you really wanted to play your Wildcard in Gameweek 1, the game simply doesn’t let you.

And yet, your Wildcard is definitely the most important chip to consider when you’re building your Gameweek 1 team. Good FPL managers are already planning for it.

That’s not because they’re expecting their Gameweek 1 players to be crap. It’s because they want to know how far ahead they need to look.

For example, let’s imagine you’re planning to play your Wildcard in Gameweek 3. That means your Gameweek 1 team only needs to be good for the first three gameweeks, after which point you can use the Wildcard to turf them all out.

Other managers would rather get a more comprehensive understanding of the form of players and teams before they overhaul their squads. They’ll need to plan their Gameweek 1 squads with a more distant horizon in mind.

The most popular time to target for the Wildcard is the massive international break between Gameweeks 5 and 6. This will last for three weeks (give us strength), which means an increased likelihood of injury turmoil and player price changes. It looks like fertile ground for a team overhaul.

There’s no right or wrong Wildcard strategy, but having one is important. It answers a question we all must ponder: Am I building a team that can last months, or just a few gameweeks?

We’ll be back on Thursday to discuss good budget defenders. Try not to get overwhelmed with excitement.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.