The six step guide to building the perfect Fantasy Premier League team – part two

Welcome back to the 3 Added Minutes guide to building the best possible Fantasy Premier League team – hopefully you’re already caught up on part one, which covered picking your big hitters and the ideal formation to accommodate them, because that means we’re all in place to cover all the remaining picks.

How do you decide which midfielder you should go for? Which goalkeeper should you sign? How many risky picks should you make? We’ll cover all of that below…

1. Nailed-on starters only

The single biggest and best piece of advice you should take on board for your first FPL team of the season is to avoid any player who could sensibly be called a rotation risk. You need all your main men playing 90 minutes as often as possible, and taking players who could easily end up riding the bench can be a disaster.

That’s because you’ll almost certainly need to use your transfers regularly during the early part of the season. There will certainly be players you pick who fall behind others on form, players who get injured or suspended, or who simply weren’t the ideal choice no matter how reasonable they might have seemed. Almost nobody will absolutely nail the squad they want from week one, and you need to maximise your transfer flexibility – and that means minimising risk.

Let’s take the example of Manchester City defenders. City don’t ship many goals and have a fairly soft start to the season, so taking someone from their back line would normally sound pretty sensible – plenty of players will opt for John Stones, Nathan Aké and Rúben Dias from the off. The chances of that being a mistake are simply too high.

Pep Guardiola loves to change his preferred starting eleven and broader tactical set-up at will, and from season to season plenty of seemingly locked-in players have struggled for minutes the very next year – just look at Aymeric Laporte a couple of years ago. With the addition of Joško Gvardiol to the squad, any of the players mentioned could easily be at risk even if they stay with the same tactical strategy they used to win the treble – and unless you live inside Guardiola’s mind - an unsettling image if ever there was one - there’s no way to know who is most likely to get the chop to make way for the Croatian. It could even be Gvardiol himself.

Guess wrong and you’re left carrying a relatively expensive player who you need to transfer out on top of everyone else you might want to move on – and that’s a bad spot to be in. And while that specific scenario applies to City, there are plenty of tempting players who could easily see less action than expected – new Spurs manager Ange Postecoglou is very rotation happy, for instance, while there’s no certainty over Mauricio Pochettino’s starting back line at Chelsea. Who will play in Liverpool’s midfield and attack? Beyond Mohamed Salah, nobody knows for sure except for Jürgen Klopp. There are a ton of Liverpool players who could become superb assets this season (Alexis Mac Allister, Darwin Nuñez, Cody Gakpo, Luis Díaz…) but we’d want to move them in rather than risk starting with the wrong ones. A big fat zero points is not how you want to start the campaign anywhere on the pitch.

2. Minimise your risks

By the same token, there are plenty of players who could be bolters this season – in other words, undervalued assets who could rack up big points but are priced lower because of previous form, injuries or simply because they’re young.

Raheem Sterling and Dominic Calvert-Lewin are great examples. Sterling has put up 200-point seasons before but is down at just £7.0m – an incredible price if the Sterling of old shows up and plays every game. Similarly, Calvert-Lewin is a proven Premier League goalscorer at £6.0m, which is gold dust. But will either be playing and on song? It’s very hard to be sure – so these are the kind of players I’d prefer to wait and see on.

There is an upside, of course, to picking such players early – if they shine from the start, then their prices will rise quickly and you can be on the right side of that rather than losing money to get them in. But because you’ll need to make transfers anyway, we’d not want too many such players in my first team. If you want one of those guys from day one, we can understand. But zero is probably more reasonable, and two is simply taking a huge gamble.

One might think that taking chances is the way to go but if you study players who routinely place around the top 1000, you’d be amazed at how risk-averse they are. Taking a reliable starting team and slowly moving in the right direction has consistently yielded better results than taking flyers from the start. If you do want to roll the dice a little – the cheaper, the better, because you’ll be taking fewer points away from your team. If you want Sterling but he has to replace, say, Phil Foden, that’s pretty risky. If you take Calvert-Lewin but are missing out on Yoane Wissa, that’s a little less likely to bite you.

3. Check the stats

Once you’ve decided on your template and are picking between specific players for positions, it’s pretty tempting to go either on last season’s points or on their pre-season form to make a decision. And while neither are bad data points to make use of – do remember to take a look at the raw stats, too.

A player may have scored a few last year, or pinged some in during pre-season, but that might also be an anomaly – check their xG and see if it remotely lines up with what they’ve got. Players tend to click somewhere back to average over time unless they’re especially good or particularly bad, so a player who undershot their expected goals last year could easily score plenty more this season, and similarly a big scorer from 2022/23 might have come in higher than they will this time around.

A great example of a high-ownership player we’d avoid on this basis is Gabriel Jesus. We have enough data now to know that he consistently underhits his xG, and can’t be expected to rack up a 20-goal season. It could happen if he finds his best form for a long time, but at £8.0m it’s just not likely enough for us. On the flip side, Darwin came in well below his xG in 2022/23 – but outscored it the year before for Benfica. Realistically he’s likely to be around a 12-15 goal player who simply played below his best, so if he’s starting games and looks in good nick, he could well be slightly underpriced at £7.5m.

It’s still worth checking out pre-season results and tactics to get an idea of how good any given asset could be, mind you – just don’t over-rely on that information. Knowing that Mason Mount is playing in a deeper role and not scoring or providing is useful (in that you should certainly avoid the former Chelsea man to start with) but expecting, say, Newcastle United’s young midfielder Elliott Anderson to pick up a ton of points after a prolific pre-season might be more optimistic. He scored four and assisted three over the Magpies’ friendlies, but that doesn’t mean he’ll suddenly start every game.

4. Don’t overpay for a goalkeeper

Another feature of almost all the best teams in the FPL is that they don’t spend much on goalkeepers. The difference between what a £5.5m goalie and a £4.5m stopper can score simply isn’t big enough to make it worthwhile.

We’d generally recommend going with a £4.5m player and a £4.0m back-up who has a chance of playing – Alphonse Areola of West Ham United and new Nottingham Forest signing Matt Turner being the best current examples of the latter. If you’re really unsure about the options at £4.5m (and the field does look a little weaker this season), a £5.0m option like André Onana is defensible, but that should be your maximum. Ederson simply won’t get you enough points to justify pushing an extra £0.5m his way.

5. Be wary of high-ownership players

In general, we’d say that worrying too much about the FPL economy is quick way to tie yourself in knots – but it is worth being a little wary of players with really high ownership, because they have the highest potential to sting you if they start badly and everyone suddenly ships them out.

Price rises and drops are predicated on the number of players who buy or sell them, so a player that everyone has and then sells if they blank for a couple of weeks could see their price tank quickly – putting you in an awkward position if you planned to sell them on later.

This isn’t likely to be a major concern in the case, say, of Erling Haaland. He has a colossal 86.5% ownership at the time of writing, but if he’s in your team you’re almost certainly banking on him, and shouldn’t be planning to move him on even if he has a quiet start to the campaign. But it could hurt if you take someone like Brighton full-back Pervis Estupiñan.

The Ecuadorian defender is a hugely popular player, with 51.7% of players naming him in their squad so far. That’s understandable, because he had a strong ending to the season and his team have a fairly good set of starting fixtures, so there’s every chance he does well. The problem is that, after gameweek 4, Brighton have a horrible run of games and most owners will want to move him on – so if you have that in mind and he starts badly, his value will drop more quickly because so many people will shift him.

That puts you in awkward position going forward – if he starts badly. We’d categorise players like Estupiñan as mild risks, so in other words while there’s every reason to own them from a statistical point of view and based on their potential returns, they’re players who could force you into a transfer you don’t want early doors. Having one or two such players can be navigated. Too many is a recipe for disaster.

6. The value of ‘set and forgets’

Let’s finish with one final pointer – remember that while your squad will have plenty of players picked for their early-season fixtures, you can’t transfer everyone out, so you need a core of players who won’t be going anywhere. For such players, worrying about their early gameweeks is simply meaningless, as they’re going to part of the squad for the long haul.

These are typically either your most expensive players, like Haaland, or they’re cheaper options who fill out the team. An example we’ve included in every draft we’ve built is Sven Botman from Newcastle – at £4.5m he’s pretty cheap and while Newcastle haven’t got the best run of games to open up, he’s likely to be a solid long-term player even if he doesn’t make the eleven every time for the first few weeks.

You need to make sure that you identify a solid core of such players for your squad, players you can rely on to be steady inclusions from day one until your first wildcard. The super-cheap bench options, your £4.0m defenders and so on, should ideally be a part of this planning. The lower the risk of those players losing value, the better they are for your squad – even if they don’t get onto the pitch for you, you still want to make sure they don’t drop their price prior to a wildcard. Keep it simple with these players and it will help in the long run.

That’s it, then – hopefully this will help you figure out a team that you’re happy with and which can dominate your work leagues. Best of luck for the new season.