What are Fantasy Premier League wildcards and chips - and how should you use them this January?

If you’re new to playing Fantasy Premier League, then it can be a pretty overwhelming beast. There are a ton of rules to keep track of, lots of legwork to do to manage your team through the season and then, to complicate matters further, there are wildcards and the chips – so today we’re going to explain what each of them do and how to maximise the number of points you can get from each of them.

Now that we're in January, we've seen one wildcard come and go and we are on to our second - but below below we'll go over why you shouldn't use it just yet (unless things have gone very badly wrong indeed). Hopefully, you've also still got your triple captain, free hit and bench boost chips available too, and we'll take you through the way they work and how to get the most from them here too. Get them right, and you could be racking up the points you need to dominate your work leagues before you know it...

We’ve also already provided an in-depth guide to selecting the best possible FPL team to start the season, and you can read part one of that two-part guide by clicking this link.

Wildcards

Wildcards are the most important and impactful chips you get in the game – by activating your wildcard, you can make unlimited free transfers that gameweek and completely change your team permanently.

Normally, you get one free transfer per week, and can roll one over to give you a maximum of two free transfers in a single weekend. After that, every transfer you make will set you back 4 points – which is bearable if you’re course-correcting a larger mistake for the long term, but makes short-term purchases almost untenable, and really punishes making a bunch of changes at once if you’ve gone badly wrong.

Your wildcards, then, are a huge deal. You can swap at your entire fifteen and start again, or make major changes at key points in the season. But you’re limited on when you can use them – the first is only available until 30 December, while the second becomes available after that. You’ll almost certainly want to play both, unless you’re extremely lucky (or remarkably good) and really don’t have major tweaks to make to your team as the year wears on.

The problem with wildcards is that they can be very tempting – and a lot of inexperienced players use them at the wrong times. That’s especially true with players who feel that they’ve picked the wrong team early on in the game, and loads of players burn their wildcards in the first few weeks. That’s only a good idea if you really have had a disaster – try to be patient with your players and remember that if, say, Erling Haaland has a few quiet weeks, that doesn’t mean he’ll never score again.

Generally speaking, it’s best to hold on to your first wildcard until late in the year, because that way you can adjust your team wholesale for the busy Christmas and New Year period. For your second wildcard, available now we're in the new year, you really need to be extra strategic – as the season wears on there will be groups of double gameweeks as cup ties and the occasional frozen pitch forces postponements. Saving the wildcard to be able to load up on players playing extra games in these periods can be hugely valuable.

So try to use this chip tactically, and not just because you’ve had a few injuries or are exasperated by a couple of underperforming players – in the long run, you’ll get far better value by planning ahead and working out when you can really score big by making several changes at once. Try to stick to regular transfers as you navigate the imminent Africa Cup of Nations and Asian Cup games that will see some star players like Mohammed Salah leave for a few weeks, and try not to panic buy into form players like Dominic Solanke when you could hold on and get more from your most impactful chip in the spring.

As a side note, once you use your wildcard you lose any free transfers you’ve rolled over – so don’t leave one in the tank the week before you use this chip. It’ll be gone for good, and you’ll be back to one free transfer the week after the wildcard takes effect.

Bench boost

Taken in isolation, the bench boost looks pretty underwhelming – it allows you to score points from the four players left on your bench, who would normally not contribute to your weekly total. You get one per season, and because many players will have cheap back-ups who don’t score many points in their squad, it will look pretty undesirable a lot of the time.

And used badly, it can easily be the least important chip going – but where it comes into its own is in tandem with a wildcard, especially your second wildcard in 2024. That’s because when you’re loading up on players with double gameweeks to maximise your potential score, you can also add them to your bench and pack in some extra doubles, really maximising your score in a single gameweek.

Bench boosts and wildcards, then, go hand in hand, and you should plan to use them both in unison – but remember that you can only play one chip in a gameweek, never two, so this will require some forward planning. The good news is that it’s highly unlikely you’ll want to use the wildcard/bench boost combo until next year, so there’s plenty of time to figure it out. Besides, our weekly FPL strategy columns here at 3 Added Minutes will give you some good ideas as to when to go for it.

Triple captain

The triple captain chip is the most straightforward of the lot – once per season you can set it so that your captain scores triple points rather than just double. The chip passes to your vice-captain as well, in the event of a last-minute injury to your chosen skipper.

As with the bench boost, you’re going to want to save this for a double gameweek to maximise its potential, and you’re going to want to give it to a player who typically gets some big returns – you want to triple captain a Haaland or a Mohamed Salah on a week where they play two easy games. If you use it at any other point, you’ve probably mistimed it. And sure, Harry Kane might well score four against Luton Town in any given week, but if you use the triple captain on a player with just one game, you’re just reducing your odds of getting a big points haul. Play it safe.

Free hit

The final chip, the free hit operates just like a wildcard – but for one week only. It allows you to make unlimited changes to your team, but after that free hit expires your old team will suddenly snap back into place as if nothing had happened.

Just like with the wildcard, if you have a free transfer saved up, it would disappear the following week, so that should be planned for – and also like a wildcard, you’re almost certainly going to want to save it for a part of the season when the double gameweeks start rolling in.

During the second half of the season, there are almost always several waves of doubles, and this is where the chips really shine. As a general rule of thumb, the week with the largest number of doubles is where you’ll want to use your bench boost – so you should aim to wildcard in the week or two leading up to that. Then you’ll use your free hit for the double gameweek which has the highest number of potentially one-sided fixtures, so if a couple of big teams on winning streaks have seemingly soft doubles coming up, that’s a great time to free hit into a team which will have three players from each of those teams – but make sure you can get as close to 11 players doubling up as possible, or you could be wasting points.

Finally, the triple captain comes in for a double gameweek in which one big-scoring player can potentially rack up a ton of points. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing – if Manchester City wind up playing Bournemouth and Sheffield United in the same week, then triple up on Haaland and don’t think twice.