FPL Gameweek 33: the Arsenal or Man City captain dilemma and which Aston Villa players you need to buy

Another weekend in the Fantasy Premier League, and another double gameweek which could have a massive impact on your season – happily, our resident expert is back with more advice on how to navigate Gameweek 33.

Today, he’ll look at whether you should captain Bukayo Saka or Omar Marmoush and which Aston Villa players are worth signing ahead of their double, but before we hand over it’s our duty to remind you that this week’s deadline is a late one, on Saturday 19 April at 13:30 BST. Enjoy the extra lie-in.

Should you captain Bukayo Saka or Omar Marmoush?

This week’s a pretty big one in the FPL – no fewer than four teams are doubling up, a lot of you will be dropping bench boost and triple captain chips, and between Manchester City, Arsenal, Aston Villa and Crystal Palace there are a lot of tempting options for transfers.

Hopefully, you’ll have planned ahead a little bit already and won’t need to make too many moves in Gameweek 33, but one big decision is still who to captain – for once, it won’t just be a case of working out whether Mohamed Salah or Alexander Isak have the easier fixture.

There are two standouts among the players with double gameweeks based on recent form and their typical weekly FPL returns: Bukayo Saka, who doesn’t seem to have missed a beat since a hamstring injury; and Omar Marmoush, who has been consistently impressive since arriving from Frankfurt in January.

A couple of weeks ago, I put together an article looking in detail at just how good Marmoush was in the FPL, and it concluded that he’s an essential purchase for as long as Erling Haaland remains out – but that doesn’t mean that he’s a better captaincy choice than Saka this week. To figure out which is the better option, we need to start by looking at how many points they both get per game, both in terms of recent form and overall performance.

Let’s start with Marmoush. Over the past five games, he’s made four starts and come off the bench once, with three goals and an assist – that works out as the equivalent of Marmoush scoring 5.9 points per 90 minutes, excluding bonus points, which are a headache to fairly factor in given how much they fluctuate based on the final score, other players’ performances and so on. A single goal can be three bonus points or zero just as easily. They’re best ignored for these purposes.

To give Saka a fair shake, we’ll pretend the games against Real Madrid in the Champions League would have counted, too – that gives him five games since his return from injury, during which he would have picked up two goals and two assists (he won both of Declan Rice’s free-kicks, which counts for FPL purposes) despite coming off the bench several times – on average, he’s going at a pretty huge rate of 8.7 points per 90 minutes.

Now, Saka has in actuality been averaging 6.2 points per game over the course of the season including bonuses, so it’s unrealistic to expect him to go at 10 points per match without them, while Marmoush’s 5.9 points per game is much the same as his average, unsurprising given the small sample size. Still, Saka is in imperious form.

But will he play 90 minutes twice? He’s only started the two Champions League games since coming back and with the impending semi-final against PSG surely the priority, it’s wildly unlikely that he plays every second of both of Arsenal’s matches against Ipswich and Crystal Palace. Marmoush, on the other hand, has played at least 80 minutes in each of the last four games.

I’d say it’s reasonable to expect Saka to play around 120 of the next 180 minutes, while Marmoush should get around 170 minutes. If we use those numbers, that means that on current form, Marmoush’s expected double gameweek tally before bonus points is 11.1, while Saka’s – if he keeps going at his recent rate – is 11.7.

In other words, this is a close call. Saka’s form will regress at some stage, but he has probably got the easier fixtures. But he won’t play 180 minutes, which Marmoush might… My take is that Marmoush is the low floor, low ceiling option, and Saka is for the gamblers. Which players your opponents in mini-leagues have should inform your decision, but if Saka is benched for just one game and doesn’t continue scoring well above his normal rate, Marmoush almost immediately becomes the mathematically superior option. That’s the man I’m handing the armband to.

Is Marco Asensio still worth it, or is Morgan Rogers the man?

A couple of weeks ago, I opined that Marco Asensio’s red-hot form meant that he was a must-have for any team that could slot him into their midfield. Because it’s been that kind of season, he promptly missed two penalties this week. The FPL is like that, sometimes.

But does that mean that Asensio is a bad call for Gameweek 33? Is Morgan Rogers all he’s cracked up to be? And should you be benching Mohamed Salah to accommodate Villa and Palace players? After all, if you went hard at these recent doubles like me, you either need to leave Salah, Isak or a player on a double behind on the bench…

Despite missing both spot kicks, Asensio is still going at a rate of 7.5 points per 90 minutes from his last five Premier League appearances. Had he scored those spot-kicks, it would have been 8.7. Even Saka isn’t scoring that quickly.

Rogers, by comparison, has been ticking over very nicely with five goal contributions in five games – but it only all adds up to a sum total of 6.5 points for every 90 minutes. Asensio has come on as a (very high) impact sub a couple of times, driving his numbers up.

With Villa out of the Champions League now, rotation should be less of a factor and Asensio will surely play more minutes, making him look like a better form option that his English counterpart. Clearly budget will be a factor in your decisions, but from the point of view of simply scoring more points, it looks like Asensio is a slightly better option. Slightly.

Incidentally, both seem to be better picks right now than Eberechi Eze (4.3 points per game before bonuses), Jean-Philippe Mateta (same) or IsmaÏla Sarr (3.9) – so Villa players definitely look like better options than Palace players after a week in which the Eagles shipped 10 goals. No surprise there, perhaps.

If you’re in the boat of deciding whether to stick with a regular starter like Salah or Isak over a double gameweek player, it may help you to know that the same metric shows us that Salah is on form to score 5.9 points per game and Isak 5.2. In other words, even Sarr, who can expect to score 7.8 points because he plays twice and almost never fails to see the game out, is a better pick than Isak, who is averaging a below-his-par 5.2 and rarely plays the full 90.

Salah is still pretty untouchable considering he averages 9.9 points per match all told, but yes it’s possible, if you have a large number of players on doubles, that you should bench Isak for a week. It won’t feel good, but it’s right by the numbers.

Hopefully this has been a nerdy and rather numbers-heavy help as you try to figure out what your Gameweek 33 team should look like – for me, it’s captain Marmoush, Isak on the bench and crossed fingers for some big returns. See you next week…