Gameweek 1: Everything you need to know.

🚨 Gameweek 1’s deadline is Friday 16th August, 18:30 BST.

🤕 Budget favourite Oscar Bobb (£5.0m MID) picks up a leg fracture.

🤝 Matthijs De Ligt (£5.0m) and Noussair Mazraoui (£4.5m) both added to the game as Manchester United defenders.

👀 Brighton sign forward Georginio Rutter from Leeds. Ferdi Kadioglu, a potential Barco alternative, is next. [Romano]

😍 Now is probably the best time of the year to join LazyFPL Premium if you haven’t already.

Keep reading for not one but TWO expert Gameweek 1 FPL drafts.

Alright?

FPL is often compared to a marathon. I reckon some FPL managers derive a quiet joy from this comparison because it tacitly implies that they’re athletes of a sort.

‘What do you do for work?’
‘I’m a fantasy athlete.’

But we don’t see it. There’s nobility in a marathon. It’s a smooth glide, not a turbulent ride.

A more suitable analogy might be a long-distance sack race. Like a marathon it’s a struggle of endurance, but unlike a marathon, you’re also going to look like a sweaty, stumbling moron to any unfortunate onlookers.

We’ll be honest from the outset: this season you’re going to fall flat on your face now and again. Your arrows won’t always be green.

But gosh darnit, if you keep reading this newsletter, we promise you’re going to have more fun than you would’ve done otherwise. As good a time as one can have whilst they’re racing in a sack, anyway.

The 24/25 season has arrived. Remember: it’s a sack race, not a marathon.

Here’s everything you need to know ahead of Gameweek 1.

Usually when you hear “ffs” in FPL it’s because the player you nearly-captained-but-then-changed-your-mind-3-mins-before-the-deadline has scored a hat-trick.

But it also stands for Fantasy Football Scout. Ironically, they’re your best bet at keeping your “ffs” moments to a minimum this season.

The stats on their website are next-level. Player stats and team stats? Fine. Impressive. Bit obvious though. But how about referee stats?

You might find it interesting, for example, that Anthony Taylor gave away more penalties (14) than any other referee last season. And he’s in charge of officiating Chelsea vs Man City this Sunday.

For more of this sort of juice, click the button below and get 40% off your membership with LazyFPL.

Summary for the lazy: if you want to win your mini-leagues year after year, pick the “obvious” players for most of the season.

The word “strategy” can be off-putting. Like we’re about to start talking about chess openings or advanced warfare.

But it’s important we touch on a fundamental principle that will not only inform the rest of the content in this newsletter, but the rest of our content for much of the season.

We’re usually boring bastards.

If you’re going to do well in FPL, you need to be a little bit boring for most of the season. Stay in the sack race, sprint at the end.

Gameweek 1 is not the time for rogue differentials or hipster captaincy picks. Nobody is going to be impressed when you captain Ipswich’s Wes Burns for 2 points (sorry, Wes).

The most important lesson we can impart upon you in this entire newsletter is this: if you want consistent success at FPL - the likes of which The Professor, our resident expert, has achieved over the last 10 seasons - it’s optimal to play it relatively safe: particularly at the start of the season.

There are other ways to play the game, of course. Playing it safe probably won’t win you the whole thing, and some managers live for the differentials.

But we’re here to help you avoid idiocy, and those who go rogue from the outset usually get punished more often than not. The world’s best managers will all have very similar looking teams comprised of highly-owned players.

Probably looking something like this:

1) Doubles, blanks and chips mean less, but aren’t meaningless.

The Premier League have confirmed there will be fewer, smaller Double and Blank Gameweeks this season due to the FA Cup scheduling.

This, combined with the fact we can now roll five free transfers, means the potency of our chips has been a little diluted. Not enough salt and vinegar - someone pass us the Saxa.

2) Budget defenders are aplenty, but there aren’t many forwards/mids.

It looks like there’ll be plenty of reliable £4.0m picks amongst defenders this season, with Brighton’s Valentin Barco probably the pick of the bunch (though Brighton have apparently signed Ferdi Kadıoğlu, who might threaten his minutes). Wout Faes is a reliable pick.

There aren’t really any exciting £4.5m midfielders or forwards though.

3) Liverpool could be okay.

There was plenty of speculation over how Liverpool would cope without the blindingly white teeth of Jurgen Klopp grinning at them from the touchline, but the initial prognosis is that they might still be a decent side under the stewardship of Arne Slot.

4) The Euros hasn’t done us any favours.

Players who featured in the Spain vs England Euros final haven’t had much of a pre-season. Pep - in textbook Pep fashion - hasn’t actually played any of them yet.

It means players like Phil Foden, who ought to have been an easy pick, suddenly feel risky. Ollie Watkins, Bukayo Saka and Cole Palmer are other notable victims.

5) Erling Haaland gets more popular by the day.

When we first discussed the Haaland/Naaland debate, the Norse God was around 30% owned. He’s now 48% owned, and that number appears to be climbing every day.

Is the reality of a Haalandless squad starting to settle in as the deadline looms?

Summary for the lazy: though Pedro and Barco’s minutes are threatened by the new signings, both should be fine for the short-term.

It was all going so well, wasn’t it?

Two lynchpins to many a Gameweek 1 team are a reliable £4.0m defender and a cheap, but decent, forward.

Managers called and…

Joao Pedro (£5.5m) and Donnie Barco (£4.0m - just kidding, his first name is Valentin) looked like great picks.

And guess what? They still might be. Brighton’s signing of Leeds forward Georginio Rutter and their imminent signing of the versatile wing-back Ferdi Kadioglu might threaten their minutes eventually, but probably not yet.

One of our Premium WhatsApp moderators happens to be a Brighton expert too. He published a whole thread about Brighton player’s expected mins here.

Summary for the lazy: we’re backing Alexander Isak. But there are loads of decent options.

Listen, in the spirit of being boring, we often recommend whoever we expect to be the most popular captain. This is because:

The captaincy decision is simply too luck-based to gamble with - if you’re going to get it wrong, it’s nearly always better to get it wrong with everyone else.

Again, this is the captaincy strategy we recommend, but each week we’ll also touch on a few differentials for sorts of people who keep their hobnob dunked for longer than 7 seconds.

This week, we think Alexander Isak will be the most popular captain. He has a fantastic fixture at home to the recently promoted Southampton, and his xG/90 (expected goals per 90) last season was elite enough (0.80) for captaincy material.

He’s also the most owned player in the game at the time of writing, which helps his case.

In short, Isak is a great captain. No issues here.

There was one player who had a better xG/90 than Isak last season though: Erling Haaland.

He’ll play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge: that might look like a tricky fixture, but Chelsea’s xGC (expected goals conceded) was hardly impressive last year (around the same as Bournemouth’s) and pre-season hasn’t shown any signs that things are about to improve under Maresca.

Indeed, Haaland faced Chelsea just two weeks ago and scored two goals within the first 5 mins and eventually scored a hat-trick.

With Anthony Taylor - the biggest penalty-awarder last season - refereeing the game, it’s hard not to at least consider the £15m man. If you’ve spent that much on him, he should almost always be in your captaincy thoughts.

Mohamed Salah away at Ipswich will probably be the second-most popular pick, and Diogo Jota vs Ipswich, Bukayo Saka at home against Wolves and Heung-min Son/Dominic Solanke away at Leicester will all pick up suitors too.

For the true hipsters, Chris Wood vs Bournemouth is our differential pick.

We’re backing Isak for safety and reliability, but our resident expert might not. Speaking of which…

Somewhere deep in the recesses of the world, about three days prior to now, a cocoon hanging from the wet ceiling of an underground cave cracked open.

Out from it crawled The Professor, stretching his limbs and squinting his eyes towards a small pin-prick of sunlight.

But he wasn’t sleeping in that cocoon. He was researching underlying stats, perfecting his Gameweek 1 team and sending the occasional email to our premium subscribers.

Now out of hibernation once more, he’s ready for another top 100k finish. This is what he’s come up for Gameweek 1:

Captain: currently on Mohamed Salah, but it’s close. He’s asked me to specifically emphasise that it’s very close between him and Isak.

This team is, of course, subject to change. Forest’s Miguel was his favoured goalkeeper but he’s apparently lost his place to Sels. He’s still a big fan of Eze. Want to know the rest his logic? You can read the full email here (but you’ll need to be premium subscriber to do so).

Here’s James Cooper’s Gameweek 1 draft too:

Which one do you prefer? Reply and tell us with the word “Cooper” or the word “Prof” so we can start an argument between them.

Anytime goalscoring likelihood on the left, clean sheet likelihood on the right.

Btw, we’d usually have stats here, but given the season hasn’t started yet, there aren’t any.

We’re giving you lot £500 worth of prizes every month this season, with £3k’s worth of prizes at the end of the season to top it off.

That starts with a PS5 in August.

All you need to do is play Sleeper’s results prediction league with us. It’s totally free and you don’t need to enter credit card details etc. You basically just have to think of a funny username.

We’re genuinely playing this, and if we win it we’re keeping the PS5 for ourselves (not really, but still, we wanna win).

Just scan the code below, or click it if you’re on mobile.

(btw is it possible to scan a code using the same mobile device it’s displayed on? I don’t think so, but let us know if it is).

Right then. Ready to watch all the players you nearly picked score, whilst the ones you actually picked get injured and booked?

Good. Then you’re ready for another season of FPL.

We’ll be back in your inbox next Friday morning ahead of Gameweek 2, where we can pick through the wreckage together.

Stay lazy.

The LazyFPL Team.