Gameweek 8 | The important FPL news.

The Stuff You Should Know

🚨 Gameweek 8’s deadline is Saturday 19th October, 11:00 BST.

🙏 Arteta on Saka: “it is not a serious injury. We are hopeful”.

🤦‍♂️ Havertz “had a few issues” but “has a good chance” if he trains well.

🧤 Alisson ruled out for the “upcoming weeks”

👀 Everton’s Branthwaite and Mykolenko both in full training.

📸 Follow us on Instagram for need-to-know updates during the week.

Stick around for some sensual infographics.

Alright?

We’re back. The familiar smell of FPL (acrid and tangy, like a sweaty gooch) is in the air, and it feels great.

Did you make it through the international break in one piece? We certainly did: unshaved, unbathed but ultimately unscathed.

And luckily for us, it looks like most of our players did too.

Here’s a quick question: if you could change one thing about this newsletter, what would it be?

This isn’t like a general election - your response here will genuinely contribute to meaningful change. If you have a moment, we’ll reward you with a free FPL newsletter for life.

Unfortunately for us lazy folk, Gameweek 8 isn’t going to write about itself.

Let’s give it a helping hand (not in that way, grow up).

Gameweek 8’s fixtures.

A mad stat.

James Cooper - one of our resident experts - is now up to 15th in the all-time world managerial rankings according to PremierFantasyTools. That’s quite ridiculous.

This is just a reminder that, aside from The Professor’s extra emails every gameweek, the Broadcast WhatsApp group (where we share early team news, injury updates and other essential info by the minute) AND the community WhatsApp chats…

…you also get experts like Cooper hanging out in the LazyFPL Premium lounge, dishing out advice like a nerdy dinner lady.

Indulge your hobby for less than a pint a month and support the newsletter whilst you’re at it ⬇️

The lay of the land.

Summary for the Lazy: Saka is probably fine, and plenty of injured players could make GW8 returns.

A lot can happen in two weeks.

But in the two weeks that have just gone by, not a huge amount did.

Bukayo Saka, presumably mindful of Halloween’s encroachment, gave his owners a scare after he came off during the Greece fixture with a hamstring injury.

Arteta’s press conference was conveniently before this newsletter goes out, which means we have an update:

“It’s not a serious injury. He’s evolving well. He was probably good enough to play with the national team second game. We have some big tests today so we are hopeful.”

Kai Havertz has also had some issues and a late decision will be made on him. He’s probably not a sell unless we get something concrete that rules him out.

Aside from that, plenty of players are close to returning from injury (Alexander Isak, Yoanne Wissa, Heung-min Son, Richarlison, Noussair Mazraoui, Jarrad Branthwaite and Vitalii Mykolenko to name a few) and, well, that’s about as much as we can say about the International Break.

(…unless you happen to have the Wolves set-piece coach in your team. The club have parted ways with him since we last spoke.)

What are the top managers doing this week?

Summary for the Lazy: not a great deal.

When FPL managers look into the Mirror of Erised (yeah, we’re not above a Harry Potter reference at this time of the year), they won’t see themselves holding the philosopher’s stone.

Instead they’ll see their FPL team free from yellow, orange and red flags after an International Break.

This is the stuff that dreams are made of, assuming you’re a part of that particular brand of sad bastards that dreams about FPL.

It also presents a rare opportunity to do nothing, one that plenty of top managers will be gratefully taking.

Does Luis Diaz deserve to be the most transferred out this week?

Those still with Luis Diaz have legitimate cause for concern, but the Colombian was rested in Gameweek 7 following a Champions League game just days before. Arne Slot has talked of the occasional need to rotate players, and on this basis, there’s no reason to expect Diaz will miss Chelsea.

If you’ve kept him this far, we’d keep him for Chelsea too.

Four data visuals we liked.

Seven gameweeks’ worth of data is about enough to start taking the stats seriously.

There’s a continuous and - in our lazy opinions - rather boring debate in FPL about the extent to which we make FPL decisions based on stats.

It’s boring because the answer is invariably the same for everyone: use them to spot overlooked opportunities, but don’t be one of those weirdos who takes them as gospel.

There. Debate solved.

So when we say “taking the stats seriously”, we don’t mean “making decisions based solely on xG”. What we actually mean is “there’s enough of a sample size that the stats can be reliably depended upon to offer some insight”.

Now we’ve cleared that up, let’s look at some rather beautiful data visualisations:

Opta’s Fixture Difficulty over the next four gameweeks:

The top scoring player per club (FPL points-wise, obvs):

The best points-per-million outfielders:

Expected Goal Involvement (xGI) per player, per club:

This beauty is courtesy of the guys at @RadarFPL.

The best captain for Gameweek 8.

Summary for the Lazy: It’s Haaland.

Erling Haaland has blanked in his last two games, which is incredibly inconsiderate of him.

Though there’s justifiable temptation elsewhere, we’d argue that Wolves are still being overrated by the majority of FPL managers because, once upon a time, they were a pretty robust defensive unit.

The fact is that only three teams (the Holy Trinity - Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton) have a poorer xGA (expected goals allowed) than Wolves this season.

Two of those teams (SOU and LEI) play each other this weekend: the other plays host to Everton, who are hardly abundant with captaincy potential (sorry Dwight, but even you can’t tempt us).

If Wolves’ frailties aren’t persuasive enough, there’s also this stat: Haaland has scored more goals against Wolves (8) than any other Premier League club.

The Prof is rollin’ a transfer this weekend in true Limp Bizkit fashion. Or Tina Turner fashion, depending on your outlook in life.

Erling Haaland gets the armband.

The key stats.

You look like you need some Sleep(er).

Sleeper asked us to give out some prizes to you lot this season.

Which we’re all too happy to do. Particularly because the game you need to play to win them is fun, easy and free.

In October we’re giving out an Xbox 360. Nah just kidding, it’s a Series X.

You just need to predict the results (not the scores) of each game. Here’s our controversial prediction for the early kick-off.

Come at us.

Cheers, George.

It was incredibly sad to hear about George Baldock’s premature death during the International Break.

Not only have the countless tributes served as a testimony to his character as a person, but he occupies a special place in FPL folklore too.

He’ll be fondly remembered by millions of FPL managers: owners who were lucky enough to profit from his budget-friendly returns and non-owners who were all-too-frequently punished by them.

Thanks for the memories, George Baldock.

Right, next week is a Friday night kick-off, which means you’ll be hearing from us on Thursday evening.

Prepare yourself for some shit Halloween jokes and remember, stay lazy.

The LazyFPL Team.