Gameweek 11 | The stuff you need to know.

The Stuff You Should Know

🚨 Gameweek 11’s deadline is Saturday 9th November, 13:30 GMT.

🤦‍♂️ Palmer is “not fit” and didn’t train on Tuesday, says Maresca. “Hope to have him back against Arsenal”.

👌 Rogers and Konate both available to play in GW11 after injury-forced withdrawals in GW10.

👀 Odegaard cameos for Arsenal in the UCL.

Keep reading to see who we’re backing to turn his disappointing season around.

Alright?

How’re you finding FPL this season? That’s not rhetorical, btw:

For what it’s worth, we don’t remember a season when there hasn’t, at some point, been an existential examination into whether it’s the hardest season yet.

It’s unlikely that the level of difficulty and farce are ever-increasing. Plenty of us had to navigate the capricious doldrums of COVID-era football with nothing more than an extra Free Hit in hand. Nothing can rival that for complexity and heartache.

In reality, we reckon FPL feels more and more farcical every season because, every season, managers try to force patterns and predictability upon something that is loved precisely because of its unpredictability.

Of course most FPL managers are doomed to be miserable: happiness means bending the very nature of football to our will. By building our FPL teams, we have resigned ourselves to frequent failure because frequent success would be an affront to football as we know and love it.

Accept that and everything gets easier.

On that note, here’s what’s going to happen in Gameweek 11.

Gameweek 11’s fixtures.

What happened midweek?

There were European fixtures during the week. Enough happened to justify a dedicated section here, so let’s run you through what happened team by team.

Man City 🔵

Manchester City got pumped 4-1 by Ruben Amorim’s Sporting Lisbon on Tuesday. Plenty think this might be a foreshadowing of what’s to come when the Portuguese manager comes to Manchester United, but not Amorim himself.

Phil Foden scored City’s only goal and Erling Haaland missed a penalty.

Liverpool 🔴

Smashed Bayer Leverkusen 4-0 on Tuesday. Luis Diaz scored a hat-trick. Mohamed Salah picked up two assists. Slot later described Diaz as “a starter”.

Aston Villa 🦹‍♂️

They lost 1-0 to Club Brugge on Wednesday. Tyrone Mings, returning from a 14-month absence, picked up the ball in the penalty area and conceded a penalty. This presumably would’ve been headline news if not for some election going on across the pond.

Morgan Rogers started and played ‘66 despite his forced withdrawal in Gameweek 10. Ollie Watkins played 80 mins.

Arsenal 🔫

Also lost 1-0 on Wednesday, this time to Inter Milan. Funnily enough, it was also a handball-induced penalty. Have Premier League players forgotten the foundational rules of football? Only time will tell.

All the top-owned assets played ‘90, with Kai Havertz forced off at the end with a head injury.

Arsenal racked up 1.8xG but couldn’t score. Bit unlucky with the penalty too.

Spurs 🐓

Fielded a pretty decent squad on Thursday evening but lost 3-2 to Galatasaray.

Pedro Porro played ‘90 and scored. Son Heung-min and Brennan Johnson were subbed at half-time and Dominic Solanke came on for 25 mins and scored.

Man United 👹

Beat PAOK Thessaloniki 2-0 on Thursday evening. Amad Diallo scored them both. Decent starting XI, great performance by Amad.

Chelsea 🔵

Pumped an Armenian team called FC Noah 8-0. Presumably FC Noah is just a bloke called Noah who loves football.

Chelsea played a B-team, but with a squad that massive, it was still pretty decent. Joao Felix and Christopher Nkunku both scored a brace.

Penetrative Stats.

Has anyone else noticed that the 8% owned Bruno Fernandes has crept into the top 10 for expected goal involvements amongst midfielders this season?

We were surprised too. A mere 0.3 away from Bukayo Saka. Remember, Fernandes has just three attacking returns this season - two assists and one penalty goal (scored last week).

He is massively under-performing.

When we look at Man United’s team stats, it starts to make a bit more sense. They’re currently sixth for xG this season, behind the teams you’d expect them to be behind:

Nothing about these numbers is particularly surprising until we compare them to the actual goals scored this season:

Man United are 18th for goals scored, behind everyone but Palace and Southampton.

No team is underperforming as significantly as Manchester United.

As FPL managers who pretend to be vaguely smart, when we see underperformance like this, we ought to be seeing opportunity.

Back to Bruno. We have a player who:

• is on penalties

• has been talismanic for his team in seasons gone by

• is underperforming his underlying stats

• is playing for a team that is underperforming their stats

• is playing for a team that has just recruited a promising new manager

Right.

Their fixtures aren’t bad for the remainder of 2024 either. Arsenal and Man City away are hardly exciting, but both teams have been guilty of defensive frailty this season.

Somewhere buried deep inside Fernandes’ fiery Portuguese psyche is a player who racked up 244 FPL points (18G, 14A) in a single season. What if that version of him finds a way back to the surface?

Are the good teams shit now?

Summary for the Lazy: They’re probably just going through a phase.

Man City and Arsenal haven’t been their usual selves. They’ve gone off their food, they’ve started smoking and a source close to the clubs has told us that their most played song on Spotify last week was The Smith’s Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.

But whilst they might be wondering why they give valuable time to people who don’t care if they live or die, FPL managers are wondering why they’re giving valuable budget to players who aren’t returning FPL points to the desired frequency and volume.

It begs the question: are they shit now?

Let’s start with Man City. They’ve won half of their last six games, with two draws, one loss and three wins.

The three wins came against Southampton (1-0), Fulham (3-2) and Wolves (1-2).

It’s the nature of these wins, followed by the defeat at Bournemouth, that has prompted queries about their form. For a team of City’s standards, 11 points from a possible 18 is definitely a blip.

Intriguingly, Man City have a bit of a penchant for an autumnal blip.

Last season they lost two consecutive Premier League games in September (against Wolves and Arsenal) before three draws and a loss between Gameweeks 12-15.

There isn’t much to read into here. We’re not suggesting that Man City have an aversion to fireworks or Mariah Carey. It’s simply to illustrate that even a team like Man City are vulnerable to stints of bad form.

It’s worth noting that after 10 games last season, Man City had a marginally higher xG of 22.31 - compared to 21.27 for this campaign. Hardly a catastrophic decline.

All of this suggests that Man City will return to winning ways before long.

What about Arsenal though? James Cooper, one of our LazyFPL Premium experts, outlined his thoughts in our latest premium newsletter. The summary is thus:

Arsenal are conceding significantly more expected goals and producing significantly fewer expected goals than last season.

But there’s reason to be hopeful: their stats are skewed by early red cards in 30% of their games this season, and Martin Odegaard is about to make his return.

They also have a better fixture run on the horizon.

The consensus is that if you’ve kept Arsenal assets for this long, it might well be worth sticking with them. You’re probably through the worst of it.

The best captain for Gameweek 11.

Summary for the Lazy: It’s Haaland.

Erling Haaland is still the best captaincy pick this week in our view. We’ll continue to back him until the numbers suggest we shouldn’t.

However you spin his recent performances, Haaland has been unlucky. In his first three games of the season, he scored seven goals from 3.78xG. In the last three games he’s amassed 3.37xG and scored just one.

In virtually every single meaningful attacking metric - apart from actual goals and assists - he is top. Haaland has not changed. Only his luck (and the luck of his owners) has.

That’s probably why the bookies still have him as the most likely player to score this gameweek, despite the fact he’s away to a decent Brighton side.

With all of that being said, we’ve realised why he hasn’t been returning recently: it’s because we’ve stopped including silly pics of him in this newsletter.

That ends now:

No transfers again for The Professor - he intends to go into the international break with five free transfers banked. Anne Robinson would be proud.

Last week we talked about the fixture swing in Gameweek 12, and, barring anything crazy, The Professor will effectively have a mini-Wildcard to take full advantage.

Haaland gets the captaincy. He’s sympathetic to those who are going for a Spurs asset at home to Ipswich, or Mohamed Salah at home to Aston Villa, but Haaland’s ownership, his underlying stats and his potential upside are enough to persuade The Professor.

The big talking point here is Cole Palmer, who, as mentioned, is still a doubt at the time of writing.

Maresca has said he’s hoping Palmer will be available for Arsenal, which suggests the injury isn’t too serious. Regardless, The Prof will keep him in - Morgan Rogers (who is confirmed fit after his UCL start) will deputise if necessary.

The key stats.

Join the Sleeper train.

Sleeper trains are usually miserable. You’re uncomfortable, you’re cold and there’s always someone playing music from their phone without headphones.

We’d choose the Sleeper app any day. Just pick the teams you think will win every gameweek, get a point when you’re correct, and win prizes if you get more points than everyone else.

This month we’re giving away a Valve Steam Deck. Scan the QR code below or click here to get involved. It’s free!

Other stuff we found interesting.

• Mohamed Salah is exempt from international duty.

• Ibrahima Konate has said he’ll be ready for Gameweek 11.

• Eberechi Eze is confirmed out for Gameweek 11.

• Here’s the England squad for the upcoming international break:

Do what you can to enjoy the break. We’ll be back in your inbox ahead of Gameweek 12 unless something major happens during the international fixtures…but since when has that ever happened?

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.