Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 1: tips and who to captain as Arsenal and Man Utd eye strong starts

There are just two more sleeps until the Premier League gets back underway – can you believe it? The summer has flown by, the transfer sagas are wrapping up (well, apart from the one involving Harry Kane, of course) and it’s time to start fussing about your Fantasy team again. Thankfully, we’re here to help take the stress away from the FPL.

As well as our weekly advice columns, which will keep you updated with the latest selection news and strategy advice ahead of every transfer deadline, we’ve made life easier by producing some handy guides to building a perfect FPL team and managing your chips as we go through the season – so before we go through the key information for gameweek 1, here are the links should any of those be handy for you:

► How to build the perfect FPL team - part one

► How to build the perfect FPL team - part two

► What are the FPL’s chips - and how should you use them?

For the rest of this article, we’re going to suggest you’ve figured out your team (or at least your template) and are just figuring out who to start, who to bench, who to captain and who to have involved at all – after all, there are a few injury worries already. You’ve got until 18:30 BST on Friday to make your decisions.

Team news and pre-season omens

There are a few players who could – or will – miss the start of the season through injury, so there’s plenty of reason to keep across the press conferences through Friday.

Chelsea’s Christopher Nkunku will sadly miss at least the next three months’ worth of action, so it’s fair to say he’s out of the equation – and that could well be a big blow to Chelsea and the quality of their attack in the coming weeks.

Elsewhere there are question marks over the fitness of Kevin De Bruyne (who came on as a substitute in the Community Shield but seems unlikely to start against Burnley) and Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo – a £6.5m midfielder who could take a more attacking role in the continued absence of Ivan Toney, and will certainly take the penalty kicks off him.

Other relatively popular players with lumps and bumps include Fabian Schär, Karl Henry, Nathan Aké and James Tarkowski at the back, all of whom are doubts to some degree; Michael Olise and Dwight McNeil, who will definitely miss the start of the season from midfield; and Gabriel Jesus and Taiwo Awoniyi, with the former out for the game between Arsenal and Nottingham Forest and the latter considered touch and go. It’s worth checking for updates on Dominic Calvert-Lewin, too.

It’s also worth making a few notes from pre-season when it comes to picking your last players or deciding who makes the starting eleven. For instance, it’s helpful to know that Mason Mount is playing a considerably deeper role with Manchester United and shouldn’t be considered an especially attacking midfielder, and that new signing João Pedro has been taking the penalties for Brighton & Hove Albion. Knowing who’s fit and who’s on form, who’s taking set pieces and who’s been scoring the goals in friendly games can definitely be useful data – just don’t take it too far. I still wake up in cold sweats thinking about the time I signed Valeri Bojinov off the back of a good pre-season.

Who should you captain?

This is one of those weeks where one of the premium players has the clear best gameweek, and that usually makes them the choice. Erling Haaland will go up against Burnley at Turf Moor and if he comes anywhere near his goal record from last season it would be hard to argue against handing him the armband. Given that 86.5% of FPL players have Erlig Haaland in your team, we’d expect something like half the players in the game to captain him, maybe more – and there’s no need to go hunting for differentials just yet.

On the off chance that you’re one of the roughly one in eight players who’ve gone rogue and excluded Haaland from your team, then Bukayo Saka also looks good – Arsenal play Nottingham Forest at home and he’s coming off the back of scoring a late equaliser against City at Wembley. Elsewhere, Marcus Rashford and Bruno Fernandes are popular picks from Manchester United and their home game against Wolves could be fertile hunting ground for points, especially with the visitors having lost their head coach just days before the big kick-off.

Both Arsenal and United have decent starts to the season in prospect based on the difficulty of their fixtures, so having high value assets from those sides seems pretty sensible – but Manchester City perhaps have an even easier ride, so we’re going to spend a lot of time skippering a certain Nordic death robot over the first couple of months.

Introducing 3 Added Minutes FC

Of course, we need to put our advice where our mouth is, if that makes sense. So please welcome 3 Added Minutes FC to the world - a team built based on our own guides and sensibilities, which I’ll use to illustrate our tactics as we go along. There’s a risk with this, of course - it could go horribly badly and completely undermine my credibility. This is a gamble on a par with captaining Raheem Sterling on gameweek 1. Still, I’m nothing if not gutsy - so here we go, our team for week one:

Goalkeepers: Mark Flekken (Brentford, £4.5m); Matt Turner (Arsenal, £4.0m)

Defenders: Pervis Estupiñán (Brighton, £5.0m); Gabriel Magalhães (Arsenal £5.0m); Sven Botman (Newcastle, £4.5m); Matty Cash (Aston Villa, £4.5m); Amari’i Bell (Luton, £4.0m)

Midfielders: Mohamed Salah (Liverpool, £12.5m); Marcus Rashford (Manchester United, £9.0m); Bukayo Saka (Arsenal, £8.5m); Phil Foden (Manchester City, £7.5m); Moussa Diaby (Aston Villa, £6.5m)

Forwards: Erling Haaland (Manchester City, £14.0m); Yoane Wissa (Brentford, £6.0m); Divin Mubama (West Ham, £4.5m)

Why have we typed that out rather than simply posting a screengrab? Technical issues with sticking pictures on our articles, I’m afraid. Sorry. Normal service will resume next week, hopefully. Anyway, fingers crossed that it all works out, and let’s hope I can be back to brag of a monstrous first-week haul ahead of next weekend. Best of luck for the very first gameweek, and may all of your wild gambles work out beautifully.