Gameweek 6 | Everything you need for success.

The Stuff You Should Know

🚨 Gameweek 6’s deadline is Saturday 28th September, 11:00 BST.

⚠️ Joao Pedro is ruled out for this weekend, Rodri likely out all season.

🙏 Raya’s expected to be in contention this weekend [The Athletic].

🤕 Mosquera out with a “serious” knee issue.

👀 Lots of managers playing their Wildcards this week.

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*IMPORTANT MESSAGE: I’m on a plane on Friday morning, which means this email is up-to-date as of 08:00am on Friday. Stay diligent, something might’ve happened between 08:00 - 11:00.*

Keep reading for the Prof’s Wildcard draft.

Alright?

Here’s an intriguing stat: estimates suggest that only 20-30% of the ~10,000,000 or so FPL managers who start the season are still playing by the end of the season.

Whilst nobody other than the FPL Gods knows this for sure, we suspect that the majority of these managers drop off after bad gameweeks.

Gameweek 4 was one of the worst gameweeks in the post-COVID era, and whilst Gameweek 5 tossed us a crumb of redemption, it still cooked up a weird enough dish to alienate those who had grown accustomed to the blissful predictability of the opening three gameweeks.

All of which is good news if you’re reading this drivel.

Simply by wading through the syrupy manure of FPL management, you’re one of a dwindling minority. Longevity is overrated in this game.

We’d like to observe a minute’s silence to think about our fallen comrades, and how much better their lives must be now that they’ve ditched their FPL teams.

…

More fool them, right? Now on to Gameweek 6.

Gameweek 6’s fixtures.

Donde esta la biblioteca?

One of the things I always hated about GCSE Spanish was learning phrases that I never actually got to use on my annual trip to Benidorm.

Rather than learning useful stuff like “who should I captain this Gameweek?” or “is Nicolas Jackson the real deal, or are his underlying stats deceiving us?”, I was learning stuff like “where’s the library, por favor?”.

We like Babbel because you learn stuff you can actually use, and you learn it fast.

Check them out by clicking the hilarious button below (IYKYK) ⬇️

The best Wildcard team for Gameweek 6.

You might well be Wildcarding this week. A lot of managers are.

It’s also fine if you’re not. We’re big advocates of playing according to the needs of your team, and not every team needs a Wildcard.

But if yours does, we’re going to rip the plaster off and show you what The Professor is doing now, rather than further down the newsletter (as is customary).

Here’s his team “if he had to lock it in now”:

But there are big caveats.

He’s worried about Vitalii Mykolenko and David Raya. Both have apparently recovered from their respective ailments, but neither are what you’d call “nailed” for Gameweek 6.

There’s also a richer, braver (and presumably sexier) version of the Prof that goes for this team:

At the moment he’s £0.2m away from being able to afford this, but price changes in both directions might make it feasible before the deadline.

There’s a near-certainty that things will change between now Gameweek 6: that’s the nature of being on a Wildcard. You’re contractually obliged to change your team at least once an hour.

How to play an excellent Wildcard

To be honest, the Prof’s team is one of our more contentious segments (we tend to get at least one reply per newsletter from readers who seem to be, for want of a better word, offended at his selections) but to get a full explanation you’ll need to be a LazyFPL Premium subscriber. There simply isn’t enough room here to delve into the inner workings of the Prof’s mind.

But here some guidelines you might consider whilst finalising your draft:

• With the ability to roll five transfers, a good Wildcard means building a team that doesn’t telegraph a significant number of transfers. Resist one-week punts, look at a 4-8 gameweek horizon.
  

• Avoid recency bias. Pretend Gameweek 5 didn’t happen: would you still transfer in the same 15 players?
  

• Stats are helpful, but not definitive. Five gameweeks isn’t that long for metrics like expected goals (xG) and expected assists (xA) to be meaningful. One excellent chance is enough to flatter them. Try to focus on good footballers over good stats.
  

• Have a bench that plays, but don’t invest too much cash into it. Save yourself the selection headache.

No Salah?

Summary for the Lazy: Salah comes at an opportunity cost that ought to be interrogated.

Imagine being Mohamed Salah.

You net 41 points in your opening three gameweeks. You bag an assist in Gameweek 5. You score during a brief cameo in the EFL Cup ahead of Gameweek 6.

You’re an FPL darling. 32 years young. Shaved hair, don’t care. This is what your career is all about: scoring fictional points for armchair luddites.

And yet over hundreds of thousands of managers - including The Professor - are getting rid.

Why?

For many managers, this isn’t really about Salah. He’s an innocent bystander in the crime that’s unfolding.

It’s about the possibilities that not having Salah unlocks.

In the Prof’s case, it means being able to afford Bukayo Saka (who has LEI, SOU and bou coming up), with extra cash to spend on the likes of Gabriel and Raya.

Remember: the aim in FPL is to score the most points across your 15 players. And sometimes that means foregoing the best players for the sake of maximising the points per £1m in your team.

If you’re not intending to captain Salah, it might be tough to justify £12.8m.

Look, he’s almost certainly the best midfielder in the game, so if you’re happy to eat the opportunity cost of fleshing out your team elsewhere, keeping him certainly isn’t a mistake.

Rest assured, Salah will continue to return for his owners. The question you need to wrestle with is this: can he return more than the players you can afford without him?

The Professor thinks not.

The folly of early overall rank obsession.

Summary for the Lazy: stop sweating your rank.

We love this tweet from @FPL_HM10.

It illustrates perfectly why you shouldn’t care about your overall rank at this point.

For the lazy, the chart shows that this chap finished 173rd overall last season. But in Gameweek 8 he was ranked 1.8m.

There are even more extreme examples of this. The Professor was famously ranked at around ~4 million in Gameweek 8 last year, before sauntering towards another consecutive top 100k finish.

Let us repeat: your overall rank and mini-league positions don’t matter yet. The only thing that matters is avoiding idiocy.

Seven frame-breaking stats we’ve gathered.

What it says on the tin, really.

Here are seven intriguing stats we’ve plucked out from the spreadsheets that might distort your world view going into this gameweek.

(A reminder that whilst these might arouse some curiosity, they shouldn’t be taken in isolation. We’re only five weeks in.)

1) James Maddison has the second highest expected goal involvement (xGI) behind Erling Haaland so far.

2) No midfielder has a higher xG than Luis Diaz (2.7).

3) Marcus Tavernier has a higher xGI (2.9) than Bukayo Saka (2.8).

4) Manchester United have the third-highest xG (9.6) behind only Liverpool (10) and Man City (11.3).

5) Arsenal have the fifth-lowest xG (5.9), but they’ve had red cards in 2/5 games.

6) Brentford have the second-highest xGA (expected goals allowed), making them statistically the second-leakiest defence in the league. Only Ipswich (11.1) are worse.

7) Nottingham Forest have the third-best xGA (4.4). Arsenal (6.6) are 10th.

The best captain for Gameweek 6.

It’s Erling Haaland vs Newcastle.

Let’s not overthink this one.

The Prof is Wildcarding. We’ve shared his current draft already but we’ll share it one more time.

The captain’s armband is on Erling Haaland.

Current rank (not that it matters one jot at this point): 1.03m.

The key stats.

Sleeper with us, win prizes.

Sleeper support this newsletter, which immediately makes ‘em sound in our books.

But if that wasn’t enough, their game is actually fun to play. You just predict results and if you get more right than anyone else, we’ll give you prizes.

Other stuff we found interesting.

1. We’re on Instagram now. Follow us here for daily summaries of important news.

2. Man City lose just 11% of their games with Rodri and 24% without.

3. There were more midweek games this week. Jota was subbed off at ‘59 after scoring two, whilst Darwin played 90. Trent was rested, Salah was subbed for 30. Chelsea, City, Villa and Arsenal all played weaker sides, but Saka started and played 71. Porro was rested, Son and Solanke started.

4. De Bruyne is not expected to be out for long.

5. We’ve been nominated for a Football Content Award. If you wanna vote for us, you can here. We’re in the “Best in Fantasy Football - Organisation” section.

If you’re Wildcarding this week, prepare for some regret. You’ve almost certainly considered every player at some point, and a few of those rejects will inevitably score points this weekend.

But remember that the success of your Wildcard isn’t measured by a singular gameweek, but by the extent to which it alters the course of your season. The fruits of your efforts might not be realised for some time yet.

It’s another Saturday start next week, which means we’ll be back in your inbox next Friday. Warm it up for us and we’ll see you soon.

Stay lazy.

The LazyFPL Team.