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Why do we play Fantasy Premier League?
Is it to have fun?
Absolutely not – it’s to win!
If you’re anything like myself and James, PL fantasy drives you crazy far more often than it makes you feel good about yourself. It does, however, indisputably get your competitive juices flowing.
Few things are more satisfying than loading the app after a gameweek has finished, having a couple of scrolls down, and seeing a set of big, juicy green arrows pointing upwards. Actually winning your FPL mini-league, of course, is 10x more satisfying than this, whether it’s for money or #BraggingRights.
How do you actually win your FPL league?
You might say ‘getting lucky’, and – to an extent – you’d be right. But the cool thing about FPL fantasy – compared to fantasy NFL, for example – is that the season is long enough for luck to usually balance out. Over a real-life 38 game season it’s hard to argue that the winning team deserved it, and the same is true in Fantasy PL.
Sure, you can get screwed some weeks by injuries, red cards, unlucky captaincy picks, and so on. But (and you can feel free to call me an idealistic idiot here) I genuinely do believe that – if you play sensibly and smartly across an entire season – you’ll be rewarded for it.
Below, I’ve given my top 10 Fantasy Premier League tips to help you do just that. All are actionable, and are based on learning from years upon years of my own mistakes.
When it comes to crafting the best FPL team possible, one of the key factors is flexibility.
Rarely do you want to be completely locked-in to the team you have there and then. Instead, you want the freedom to change your structure within a couple of moves, shift from one premium to another if they become must-own, and so on.
One of several keys to this flexibility is your team value. You can’t buy players that you can’t afford, after all.
Everyone starts off with a TV of 100.0. Over the course of the season, however, your own TV will rise and fall based on FPL price changes (which I explained in detail here).
Monitoring price changes is important, and doing so is easy. The Live FPL website is far from infallible, but it gets risers and fallers right more times than not.
I have an alert set on my phone which pops up every night before I go to bed, which reminds me to check the likely upcoming price changes.
Obviously, you generally want to sell players before they drop, and buy players before they rise (Yep – buy low, sell high. That’s the kind of top-level FPL advice I provide). There are two major caveats to this, however.
I’ll cover one in the next section. The other is that team value is not the be-all and end-all.
If you definitely planned to move one player to another, and the former is about to fall while the latter looks set to rise, then sure – go ahead and pull the trigger. But do not bring in players just because they’re rising.
I see people doing this all the time on FPL Reddit and FPL Twitter, and it drives me crazy. We’re not playing the stock market here – we’re playing Fantasy Premier League. The name of the game is to score points, which means having the best players – not just the best team value.
As noted, team value is important, but it’s only one factor among many. Another pretty big factor – Top Tip alert – is not to have injured players in your team.
Obviously, you’re never going to transfer in an injured player unless they’re definitely, 100% going to be fit for the upcoming gameweek. The problem is that players who aren’t already flagged could well get injured before the next game.
That’s just bad luck, right? Well, yes and no.
The later you transfer in a player, the more likely they are to be fit and healthy when you actually need them to play.
Bring someone in on a Monday when they’re supposed to be playing on the following Saturday or Sunday, and that’s a whole lot of training sessions in which they could get hurt. Unlikely? Sure, but it still happens.
On a regular gameweek, in which teams lock on Saturday morning, you generally want to be making your transfers on Friday night.
Aside from managerial rotation, which is always a threat, this basically just leaves pre-match training as the only chance for your shiny new player to get hurt.
‘But Joe,’ I hear you cry. ‘It’s Monday night, I really want In-Form-Player-X, and he’s just about to rise!’
I hear you – it’s always tempting to move in this case – but I would really advise against it. I’d rather lose 0.1 in team value than have an injured player, who I might need to waste a transfer to shift out.
The only exception to this rule is if you’re about to get priced out of that move. In this case… you need to decide for yourself how much you want the player. If you do decide he’s a must-have, just know that you’re taking a risk by getting him early.
Final note: international breaks.
I’ll make this nice and straightforward – just stay away. Take the fortnight off. Delete the FPL app off your phone if you need to, but – whatever you do – do not make transfers during an international break. Players get injured all the time on international duty, so if you do make a move in this time, you’re taking an enormous risk. I don’t care who the player is – he’s not worth it.
There’s always a ‘template’ team in Fantasy Premier League, which I’ll discuss in the next section.
The players you choose who aren’t part of that template are your ‘differentials’ – the players that differentiate your team from many other people’s.
If you’re looking for a differential for your overall rank (OR), you’ve got loads of choices. So many that it can (very) often lead to analysis paralysis. If you’re just trying to win your mini-league, it’s actually much easier to find a differential.
How do you do it? There are a mere two steps.
First, take a sneaky peak at the team/s belonging to the person/s you’re chasing down.
Second, pick players that they don’t have.
Easy!
Obviously, there’s a caveat here, which is… you still have to pick good players. The specific players you should be looking at depends on the stage of the EPL fantasy season you’re at, and how far behind you are.
If there’s still half a season to go, for example, there’s little need to panic whatever the points deficit. Play it safe and make smart, steady picks as you (hopefully) normally would.
If there are only a few weeks to go, however, and you basically need to rack up the Fantasy Premier League points ASAP, this is when you can afford to take some real punts.
Look for in-form players, regardless of their track record, or players who aren’t actually that great but have top matchups.
You can afford to gamble with high-risk/high-reward picks at this point – it doesn’t really matter whether you finish sixth instead of third if your choices don’t work out, for example, so you might as well go for the top spot.
Bearing in mind my last FPL tip, you should – in general, for the vast majority of the season – not be straying too far from the template.
The template is the template for a reason.
Primarily, it normally has the best and/or most consistent players. Heading into the 2022/23 FPL season a couple of years ago, for example, everyone had the likes of Haaland, Salah, and Alexander-Arnold in their teams because they’ve delivered year-in and year-out for years.
The other reason why players become ‘template’ is because they provide irresistible value.
Every man and his dog had Gabriel Jesus in his FPL team heading into 22/23, for example, simply because – even if he hadn’t previously set the world alight – they were getting a starting striker, for a potential top-four team like Arsenal, for a mere 8.0m.
Do be aware, however, that the template will change as the season goes along.
This is normally due to a Player of Irresistible Value coming along, since everyone already knew about the big names.
A great example was Tammy Abraham in 2019/20, who started at only 7.0, promptly ended up playing up top for Chelsea, and went on a massive hot streak. This made him an absolute snip, and a must-own in PL fantasy football terms.
Watching out for these ‘new template’ players is key to not being left behind in your FPL league. You can bet your bottom dollar they won’t have escaped the attention of your rivals.
Is giving FPL players ‘the hit’ an act of kindness, or one of cruelty? I’m still not sure.
On the face of it, it seems great to be able to exceed your allotted transfers for a gameweek. In practice – in my experience, at least – it tempts you into making transfers that weren’t strictly necessary, and lopping some points off your total for good measure.
As a rule of thumb, avoid taking hits.
-4pts doesn’t sound like much, does it? But a hit here and a hit there really does add up.
Take one just every four gameweeks, and you’re still costing yourself 38pts across the season. That’s the equivalent of 9.5 precious clean sheets, 12.7 lovely assists, or 9.5 delicious goals from your forwards.
(If you need a reminder, check out my full explanation of how Fantasy Premier League points are calculated).
I’m not advocating that you should never, ever take a hit for your FPL team – only that you should do so when it’s actually the smart thing to do.
Obviously you can’t see the future, but here’s an easy and effective way to look at it – is the player you’re bringing in genuinely likely to outscore the one you’re taking out by at least 4pts?
Let’s say a few fixtures have been postponed in a gameweek, and you’ve only got 10 playing players in FPL fantasy football.
In this case, whoever you’re hitting out is currently getting a big, fat 0pts. If you’re bringing in a nailed-on starter, then you’re already (in theory) making up 2pts. Even so, they need to stand a good chance of making up the rest of that deficit in some way, or of outscoring the binned player by that amount, in the upcoming gameweeks.
TLDR: Taking hits is always tempting, but don’t overlook the points you’re losing. Only do it when it’s strictly necessary.
Between this and the no-hits advice, I know I sound like the anti-fun FPL police.
Taking hits and making transfers are both exciting.
If you’re borderline obsessive over FPL (or far beyond that border, in the case of myself and James), weighing up the moves you want to make – based on form, fixtures, FPL price changes, ownership percentages, and so on – is the most engaging part of the game.
Again though, you have to try and control yourself here.
When you have one transfer you can only make a straight swap, for a single player who fits into your budget. In short, only having one transfer is extremely limiting.
Having two or more transfers (you can bank up to five) gives you vastly more freedom to reallocate your budget, and the ability to really change the balance of your team.
If an important player is injured, and/or is going to drop in price, and you didn’t really want them anyway, feel free to transfer them out. Likewise, if you’re swapping roughly equivalent players to take advantage of swings in FPL fixtures, that’s also fine.
If you’re about to simply make a ‘luxury move’, however, and you’ve only got one transfer to use, think better of it.
More often than not you’re better off biding your time, banking the transfer, and giving yourself the freedom to make a bigger and better move the following gameweek.
Captaincy is probably my least favourite part of Fantasy Premier League.
It simply doesn’t fit with the rest of the game. Points are supposed to be hard to come by, and doubling one player’s total throws the balance completely out of whack.
It also gives far too much credence to something which is often luck-based.
If there are two highly-owned players, both of whom have great matchups, are in good form, and so on, you’re basically flipping a coin about who to captain. If you happen to get it right, you feel great; if not, you feel like an idiot. In neither case did you actually do anything special.
Long story short: don’t overthink captaincy.
Some weeks it’ll go your way, some weeks it won’t. You just have to hope it’ll balance out over the course of the season, and have no effect on actually winning your FPL league.
You should almost always pick reliable, consistent players to be your captain.
It’s trendy on FPL Reddit to see people floating wild punts out there. Leave those to the attention-seekers, and pick a big gun instead.
They should be their team’s top goalscoring threat, and ideally on penalties too, which greatly increases their chances of returning. Think your Haalands of this world, who rack up FPL bonus points most weeks, rather than your streakier players.
In your initial FPL draft heading into the season, you should make sure you have a complete playing bench.
By a ‘playing bench’, I mean three players who start games for their respective teams. As you surely know, this means that – if one of your starters drops out for injury or any other reason – you’re still guaranteed at least a couple of points for whoever gets automatically subbed in.
In that initial configuration, you should not spend more than the minimum on these bench players.
Having three 4.5s is perfectly fine, since this trio is almost entirely for backup purposes only. You’re much better off spending the money on the starting lineup for your FPL team, or leaving a little in the bank to change that lineup down the road.
The real challenge of the playing bench, however, is maintaining it throughout the season.
Sooner or later, one of these players will get injured. Resist the temptation to transfer them out, unless you’ve got two transfers banked and literally nothing else to spend them on.
You might suffer price drops (and a small decline in your team value) as other players do bin their bench fodder, but it’s a price worth paying. I’d only make a transfer here if literally all my bench players were unavailable (which is rare, but can happen).
When it comes time to play your wildcard, that’s when you can finally reload your bench. This is your chance to get three starting backups, but remember to still only spend as little as realistically possible.
To create the best FPL team possible, the vast, vast majority of your budget should be towards the players who are actually going to play each week. This will usually be made slightly easier by the time you wildcard, since some worthwhile players will typically have dropped below 4.5 in value.
Ah, speaking of playing your wildcard…
Actually, it’s quite difficult to give FPL advice on when to drop your wildcards. It depends to a big extent on your current team composition, and your position in your FPL league.
That being said, there are some general rules of thumb you can follow.
As you hopefully know, you get two wildcards per season – one in the first half and one in the second. Personally, I like to play my first wildcard late (generally… obviously there are exceptions).
A lot of people panic when they get off to a slow start, and they realise they whiffed on several supposed must-have players.
Don’t fall into this trap. As in so many areas of Premiership fantasy football, patience is key here. Players who look ‘must-have’ in the first month of a Premier League season often bomb thereafter. Lukaku in 2021/22 was a perfect example, smashing Arsenal early doors then promptly looking so out of place that he was benched come Christmas.
Sometimes, of course, there will be genuine must-have players that you don’t currently own.
In this case, I prefer to get to them via regular transfers, rather than wasting my wildcard on it. Whatever your team composition, you can almost always do this within a couple of gameweeks, even if you have to take a -4 for the privilege.
Another reason I like to play my first wildcard late is because I also like to wait on the second one.
The Premier League season gets crazy in the late winter and spring. The top teams usually have matches rearranged for European competitions, which results in every FPL manager’s favourite presents – double gameweeks. Setting up your wildcard to take advantage of these can result in a huge late-season surge.
Double gameweeks should also determine your (second half) triple captain and free hit usage. With both chips, wait until the double gameweeks before using them.
You’ll have to pass up some mouthwatering FPL fixtures to resist using your second triple captain, but having two games instead of one makes this easily worth it.
Saving your free hit until a few of the top teams are on DGWs can also result in a monster points total, which is particularly satisfying later on in the season, and can be a big step in how to win your FPL league.
In short, I don’t care how badly your FPL league seems to be going. Hang onto those chips regardless, and wait for the actual right time.
Things FPL Reddit is good for:
Things FPL Reddit is not good for:
Fine, that’s an oversimplification… but not by much.
If you like Fantasy Premier League, chances are you stop by FPL Reddit every now and then. Again, I don’t want to sound like the FPL anti-fun police. But – unless you’ve got an abundant amount of self-confidence, which stops anything you read there from influencing you – this is a habit you should curb.
Rate My Team, Player X Replacement, Latest Wildcard Draft… bin all these posts.
At least 90% of the FPL tips in these threads are written by people who – in some combination – don’t consume enough stats or actual game-watching time to make their opinion worth following.
It’s still human nature, however, that – if you see a player recommended enough on these threads – you feel like they’re a safe or smart pick. They’re not!
When it comes to picking FPL players, the two best and most rewarding things you can do are conduct your own research, and watch the games.
If you want some additional FPL tips, make sure they come from people who do both of those things, not just the FPL Reddit/FPL Twitter crowd.
The likes of FPL General (@FPLGeneral) and Let’s Talk FPL (@LetsTalk_FPL / YouTube channel) are two great examples. Obviously, myself and James try to fulfil the same roles with our general Fantasy Premier League advice and weekly FPL Tips columns.
Hopefully my Fantasy Premier League tips in this article have provided you with a little extra guidance in how to win your FPL league. All of this advice should also help to improve your OR.
To summarise, these would be my five main Fantasy Premier League tips for how to win your league:
The last of my Fantasy Premier League tips would be to actually try to have fun, and remember that FPL is a game.
That sounds stupid and facetious. But picking players you actually like, and making transfers based on your own instincts, are both stimulating and rewarding things to do.
In my own experience, I’ve found that – when I loosen up a bit, and start trusting my instincts rather than overthinking every move – I play a lot better, and enjoy FPL a whole lot more.
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