The lazy 25/26 season review.

⬇️ West Ham are the third and final team to be relegated.

⬆️ Hull win the playoffs and are promoted alongside Coventry and Ipswich.

🏆 Crystal Palace win the Conference League final.

🌎 World Cup Fantasy is live. Here’s a code to join our league: 74K5WLJY

Alright?

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve shuffled off your fantasy coil and successfully entered the afterlife that exists in the space between football seasons.

By pure coincidence, it happens to be called Heaven, but it’s named after Man United’s £3.7m defender Ayden Heaven, and shouldn’t be confused with the blissful paradise depicted in some religious texts.

FPL Heaven is nothing like religious Heaven. Confusingly, it’s more like a cross between the religious depiction of purgatory and hell. Monotonous and torturous in equal measure. Welcome - you’ll need a brolly.

Thankfully, it only lasts until August, and we’ve got plenty to distract ourselves until then.

In the first of our post-season newsletters, we’ll pick through the burnt ashes of the 25/26 campaign in search of answers to a simple question: What, if anything, did we learn?

We’re spending the summer immersing ourselves in World Cup Fantasy. Ever wondered who Curaçao’s set-piece takers are? We’ve got them tattooed on the inside of our eyelids.

If you're taking the game even remotely seriously, Lazy Premium gives you everything you need to stay ahead.

📩 Matchday newsletters ahead of every deadline, packed with insight from the Professor and our newly assembled team of tournament fantasy experts.

🧭 A comprehensive fixture tracker built for squad building and tournament strategy, with attack and defence filters, progression probabilities, captaincy planning and substitution rotation tools.

📲 Daily WhatsApp updates covering key team and player news, injury updates, rotations, and deadline reminders, delivered straight to your phone so you don't get caught out.

🤫 Expert team reveals, thoughts and plans ahead of every Matchday, including different chip strategies to help guide your own decisions.

🎧 Podcasts throughout the tournament tackling the biggest decisions and talking points.

🏆 Entry into our £500 World Cup Mini-League.

All for a fiver. Upgrade by clicking the Alain de Botton below:

Let’s start by looking at the 25/26 team of the season - or the TOTS, if you’re in the industry.

There are some notable takeaways here:

1) Fish and Chips.
2) Chinese.

Crap takeaway jokes aside, here’s the actual list:

1) Every top-scoring defender is a centre-back.

This season’s five top-scoring defenders were centre-backs (Gabriel, Marc Guéhi, Virgil van Dijk, Marcos Senesi, James Tarkowski). Gone are the days of Leighton Baines, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Ben Chilwell running the FPL show.

Well, they may not be totally gone. You see, as well as benefiting from plenty of clean sheets and defensive contributions, Gabriel, Guéhi, and van Dijk were among the top defenders for goal involvements, scoring or assisting 8, 8, and 7 goals, respectively. No defender managed more than 9 goal involvements this season.

The trend towards more attacking contributions from centre-backs is no doubt a result of an increased emphasis on set-pieces - the 25/26 season saw the most goals from corners since 13/14.

But we should also acknowledge the absence of any prolific full-backs this season, too. Consider the 17 goal involvements that Alexander-Arnold amassed in the 19/20 season, for example. No full-back came close to those sorts of returns this season, which begs the question: Are full-backs less important, or did 25/26 just happen to be an off-season for them?

2) But defenders did score more points on average.

The three defenders in this season’s TOTS each scored, on average, 39.6 points more than the three defenders in the 24/25 TOTS.

This feels pretty intuitive given the introduction of DEFCON points, but it’s worth acknowledging anyway. We’ll talk about DEFCON in more depth shortly.

3) Class is permanent.

There are always some surprises in the TOTS (we’re looking at you, Igor Thiago and Morgan Gibbs-White), but this season once again demonstrated that proven, quality players tend to perform well.

The defence is predictable enough, and Erling Haaland, Bruno Fernandes and Jarrod Bowen have all been in recent TOTS line-ups. Antoine Semenyo’s move to Man City means he’ll likely be a premium next season, too.

For balance, it’s worth acknowledging that some premiums didn’t perform as expected. Cole Palmer, Mohamed Salah, and, to a lesser extent, Bukayo Saka all had underwhelming seasons.

Tellingly, every player in this season’s TOTS has played at least one season in the Premier League already. The highest-scoring Premier League debutant this season was Adrien Truffert (165 points).

It was around Gameweek 20 when the world’s top FPL managers suddenly realised that DEFCON points were quietly turning “average” FPL picks into sleeper premium assets.

Nobody embodied that more than Eliott Anderson. Narrowly missing out on the TOTS, he finished the season on 180 points, comprising 4 goals, 5 assists, and 50 DEFCON points. Having devised a complex mathematical formula so you don’t have to, we’ve calculated that 50 points is 10 goals-worth for a midfielder. Blimey.

It’s very good for any player, but it’s remarkably good for a midfielder who started the season at £5.5m.

Anderson is the most emphatic example of DEFCON in action, but other players used it to great effect, too. For example, it might surprise some of you to learn that James Garner (159 points) scored more than Enzo Fernández (157), and Bruno Guimarães (154 points) scored more than Bryan Mbeumo (149).

Fernández and Mbeumo attracted far more ownership over the season than Garner and Guimarães, yet keeping the latter pair in your team would’ve yielded better returns in the long run.

Defenders

We’ve already discussed that centre-backs were the winners in this season’s TOTS, but it’s worth acknowledging that the sixth-highest scoring defender, Adrien Truffert, was a full-back.

His 165 points were comprised of 1 goal, 7 assists, 11 clean sheets and 24 DEFCON points.

Nordi Mukiele (151 points) was tenth amongst defenders for FPL points and the highest-scoring £4.0m defender of all time. His 26 DEFCON points were complemented by 3 goals and 5 assists.

Thus, a new, sexy genre of FPL player is born: The DEFCON-scoring full-back. Spotting these guys early isn’t just a great outlet for FPL points, but also an underrated source of value. Truffert started the season at £4.5m. Mukiele, as already mentioned, was as cheap as they come.

What can we take into next season?

Yeah, if you haven’t twigged by now, you ought to be taking DEFCON seriously next season.

That’s all well and good, but unfortunately, we won’t be the only ones who have noticed the value of players like Anderson. Expect DEFCON-prone assets to be priced accordingly.

The challenge, as is always the case with FPL, will be to find the players who start getting DEFCON points regularly for the first time next season. These might include newly promoted players, new transfers or existing assets that have been given different roles.

We’ll let you know when we spot them because we’re decent like that.

We don’t usually put too much stock in the FPL winner, because winning the whole thing usually means adopting a suboptimal strategy and getting away with it. Like that Everton fan who won it despite boycotting Liverpool players.

However, there were some lazy-worthy observations from the winner, a Danish newcomer called Erik Ibsen, that we wanted to share.

1) Less is more.

Here’s a table stolen from an interview with Erik, published by the Premier League, showing his transfer activity.

As you can see, in 15 of the 38 gameweeks, Erik didn’t make a single transfer. Remarkably, he didn’t take a hit all season.

This reinforces one of the fundamental tenets of the LazyFPL manifesto: Less is more. If your players are fit and healthy, you’re usually better off being lazy and doing nothing.

2) Lean on DEFCON.

Erik went hard on DEFCON from the outset. Whilst more seasoned managers wanted the opportunity to see how they translated in real life, Erik’s Gameweek 1 team included the two players who would’ve scored top for DEFCON last season: James Tarkowski and Moisés Caicedo.

Erik doubled down on DEFCON as the season progressed. His logic was smart: If I have five players in my team who regularly score DEFCON points, that adds a possible 10 extra points per gameweek to my baseline.

3) Accumulate transfers when you can.

The ability to save up to five free transfers was also new this season, and Erik used it to pick up premium players as they came into form.

As per the table above, there were 11 gameweeks in which he made either two or three transfers. His ability to refrain from making transfers when he didn’t need to meant he could be liberal with them when he did. It was how he was able to move to in-form premiums without taking hits.

4) Play your own game.

It’s one of the mottos of LazyFPL Premium, and it applies here, too. Our aim at LazyFPL isn’t to tell you how to play: It’s to supply you with enough information that you feel empowered to make your own decisions.

Erik won by playing his own game. His captains earlier in the season exemplify this approach:

Gameweek 1: James Tarkowski (8 pts)

Gameweek 2: David Raya (12 pts)

Gameweek 5: Marc Guéhi (14 pts)
Gameweek 7: David Raya (12 pts)
Gameweek 11: Declan Rice (4 pts)

These choices didn’t always reward him emphatically, but they demonstrate a willingness to go against the conventional wisdom. Remember, following conventional wisdom is usually enough to get you a top-100k finish. You’ll win your mini-leagues. That’s how managers like The Professor stay so consistent.

But if you want to win the whole thing, you have to go against the grain and accept that you’ll probably be punished as a result.

The 25/26 season was unique. Three significant rule changes (DEFCON points, transfer accumulations and two sets of chips for each half of the season) came into effect, ushering in new vocabulary, new challenges and, most pertinently for this newsletter, new tactics and strategies.

It’s unsurprising that this season’s winner recognised and capitalised on those new strategies so early on.

Here’s what we’ll be trying to remember for next season:

1) The best budget options aren’t the players who might get the occasional attacking return anymore. They’re the ones who regularly score DEFCON points.

2) Lean on tried and tested FPL assets. Avoid shiny new transfers or players from newly promoted teams.

3) Accumulate transfers whenever possible. Avoid point hits.

4) Trust centre-backs more. Expect more points from your defenders in general.

5) Read LazyFPL.

Right, we’ll be back next week with a proper look ahead to the World Cup, the latest transfer news, plus anything else you might need to know.

Meanwhile, enjoy the first of many FPL-less weekends. We heard a rumour that there’s all sorts that goes on at 3ish on a Saturday - it’s not just football. Please reply and confirm if true.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.