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The stuff you should know 🚨

⏰ Gameweek 5’s deadline is 11:00 BST on Saturday 16th September.

🎉 It marks the end of a relatively uneventful international break.

📈 Son gaining serious traction, Jackson on the decline.

🏆 European competition starts next week.

👀 Last Sunday’s email discusses DGW7, whether to Wildcard and plenty more.

Stick around to find out what bizarre item we were sent by one of you lot.

Alright?

I’ve been in Italy this week. International break and all that.

Staring at Michelangelo’s celestial masterpiece that adorns the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I was moved to ponder a thought that I’m sure has struck the minds of many who gaze up, achey-necked and awe-inspired, from the hallowed tiles of the chapel floor: is Son Heung-min really as essential as everyone seems to think?

Today we’ll explore the answer to that question, amongst many more.

Btw, there were some tech issues with last week’s email. We’re not sure what happened because, frankly, we’re all morons. Hopefully it won’t happen again.

It’s good to be back. Let’s get into it.

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FML. Second time’s a charm? Let’s hope so, because they’re sending the boys round if this one cocks up.

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Go on my Son.

If the FPL community’s tips are to be taken at face-value, the hierarchy of needs for human survival would look something like this:

1. Oxygen

2. Son Heung-min/water

3. Food

4. Jude Bellingham in an England shirt

Oxygen edges it, but only because the average FPL manager’s lung capacity is too small to transfer in Son without taking a breath.

Son scored a hat-trick in Gameweek 4, but crucially, he did it playing OOP (out of position) as a forward.

Naturally, this has plenty of managers salivating. 574,000 at the time of writing, to be precise.

Is he injured?

Probably not. He played for 90 minutes for South Korea after the rumour of his injury emerged. A decent indicator that he is not, in fact, injured.

Will he continue to play as a forward? 

Listen, shocking as this may be to you, none of us here at LazyFPL are real football managers. Still, I reckon if I tried a player out as a forward and he scored a hatty, I might be inclined to give him another go there. Wouldn’t you?

Should you transfer him in? 

Here’s a handy graphic that shows us Son’s stats this season and his next five fixtures.

None are particularly exciting.

The change in position last week absolves him of underwhelming stats, and it’ll be intriguing to see if better teams who are expecting him to play up top can mitigate his potency.

But there’s a bigger question here: who exits so that Son can enter? The mid-priced midfielder category is hotter than Hansel right now, and very few of the template picks have been so convincingly poor that they deserve the chop so soon.

Though rapidly growing, Son’s ownership currently sits at 12.1%. He’s still a differential, and that means we can afford to take our time. Let’s monitor:

1. whether he continues to play as a forward

2. how he gets on against better teams

If he can pass both of those tests, he’s in.

The stuff that happened over the international break.

Given we’re a newsletter whose primary function is to relay FPL-relevant events, the international break has almost been disappointingly uneventful.

Here are the lowlights:

• Trent Alexander-Arnold missed Liverpool’s most recent training session following his withdrawal from the England squad.

• Gabriel and Son are fine, despite rumours of injury.

• Richarlison seems to be going through some personal issues, which he has said he will address when he’s back in London.

• Jadon Sancho is training alone after complaining about being made a scapegoat.

It means something exceptionally rare looks to have occurred: none of your key FPL players have picked up an injury. If that’s not an excuse to dust off the old Kool and the Gang record and celebrate, we’re not sure what is.

Is Mr Jackson for real?

Despite only notching one attacking return this season (two fewer than his current yellow card tally), Nicolas Jackson is exactly the sort of player that good FPL managers keep hold of. Why?

Firstly, he has a higher NPxG (that’s non-penalty expected goals to you and me) than anyone else in the league. In other words, with an NPxG of 3.0, he is massively under-performing.

Secondly, he still has excellent fixtures on the horizon. Bournemouth are next.

Thirdly, he’s still highly likely to start every game for the time being.

Great stats, great fixtures and likely to continue to start most games. The holy trifecta. Whilst nothing is guaranteed in FPL, he’s probably worth holding for at least his next two fixtures.

The best captain for Gameweek 5

Yup, you guessed it. It’s Erling Haaland.

Some managers are tempted to go for a differential this week, which is understandable given that the Norse God only scored 20 points in Gameweek 4.

The temptation comes mostly from Mohamed Salah and Heung-min Son, a pair of seductive sirens infamous for luring FPL managers away from their planned course and into the foamy depths.

We did a Twitter thread here about why that’s probably not a good idea.

The key stats

We promised to start sending you all the need to know stats from Gameweek 5 onwards, and we’re nothing if not lazy managers of our word.

Here they are:

The Professor’s Team

The Professor is happy with his team, which means no transfers this week unless something weird happens.

His dilemma concerns his bench. He can only manage 8kg, and that’s with a spot.

His other issue is who to bench in FPL. William Saliba gets the nod ahead of Pervis Estupinan given their fixtures, but a source close to the Professor has told us that it’s marginal.

Here’s his team:

Btw, you might be wondering why the Prof’s team view looks so darn sophisticated. That’s Fantasy Football Hub’s MyTeam: a team-planning, points-predicting, mini-league-winning behemoth. You can subscribe to Fantasy Football Hub and get access to MyTeam, plus loads of other tools, articles and team reveals, right here.

Other stuff we found interesting.

• The gap between a 2m rank and a place in the top 10k is a mere 50 points. Don’t lose faith.

• Man City play 7 games in the next 25 days. Rotation looms.

• Nottingham Forest have just signed Benfica’s goalkeeper Odysseas Vlachodimos, who is likely to usurp Matt Turner.

• This bottle of lube sent to us by an anonymous reader.

  

No early kick-off next Saturday, which means we’ll be with you Friday afternoon. If you enjoyed this email, please press “reply” and let us know - it’s always nice to hear from you.

Until then, stay lazy.

The LazyFPL team.