New Fantasy Premier League 2024/25 rules: how transfers, wildcards and picks will change
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The 2024/25 season of the Fantasy Premier League is set to go live imminently (and indeed may well have gone live by the time you read this) but before we get to dig down into hundreds of prices to sniff out bargains and start building teams, we’ll have to work out how to deal with a host of huge new rule changes which were announced on Monday and which affect transfers, wildcard strategy and bonus points – and that’s before we worry about what the ‘mystery chip’ might do.
Just like last season, when I finished 1,693 in the world – just 12 frustrating points off the top 1,000 – I’ll be offering up pre-season strategy guides and weekly advice columns to help you maximise your points total and dominate your mini-leagues, but before the final price reveals it’s time to look over the raft of brand new rules and see how they will affect our strategies over the course of the season.
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This is probably the biggest change to the way the game is played and it will open up whole new ways to handle transfers – from now on, instead of being able to roll over a maximum of two free transfers, players can horde up to five transfers for future use, allowing players to keep their team ticking over when they’re happy without losing resources.
Furthermore, when players use wildcards and free hits, they won’t lose all their banked free transfers – one of two changes which really reduce the impact of our chips, which we’ll get on to shortly.
This allows players several squad management options. They can carry on as they have in previous years, buying and selling regularly in the hopes of catching players in the right form at the right time, or they can settle for their squad as is and make big changes all at once when the fixture list demands it.
It’s not yet clear which method is superior – we just don’t have the data – but one thing that won’t change is that players should almost certainly still be proactive early. Partly, that’s because human nature means that a lot of players will still make the same panicky, knee-jerk early transfers they always have done, but also because these changes will likely make people very relaxed about using early wildcards, thinking that they can just save transfers up effectively bag an extra pseudo-wildcard down the line.
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Hide AdThe result is that while the ability to save extra transfers will probably slow the rate of price changes down as the season wears on, there’s a very good chance that prices change even more quickly than before for the first few weeks, as people will feel more able to abandon their initial team. As a result, it’s likely that players should still be active in the opening weeks, quickly buying and selling players that seem to set to underwhelm or over-perform.
After that, however, it’s nice to have the option to play in a more sedate manner. It feels unlikely that it will be correct to go without making transfers five gameweeks in a row very often, but it does reward patience, and saving an extra transfer or two will help teams to adjust to big changes in fixture difficulty and unexpected injuries or suspensions. It’s probably right to stay busy at the start, but then take things slower as the game goes on.
Chips losing power
While the existing chips (two wildcards, free hit, triple captain and bench boost) will continue to function exactly as before, it’s worth noting that all of the chips will be far less valuable than they have been in the past due to a change in the Premier League schedule.
Tweaks to the fixture list mean that there should be far fewer clashes between Premier League games and FA Cup ties as the season progresses, and that means many fewer blank or double gameweeks – and they will have fewer missing or bonus fixtures than they did in the past.
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Hide AdIn previous years, it was the right strategy to carefully horde wildcards until the key doubles at the end of the season, but now that line of thinking becomes far less important. It will still be right to hold on to triple captain and free hit for possible small double or blank weeks, but between the lack of crux gameweeks and the ability to horde extra free transfers, wildcards are far less important than they were before.
That means that if you do make a hash of your opening team, using your wildcard may finally be a perfectly sensible plan – in previous years, it was seldom worth it to burn a key chip so early unless things had gone spectacularly wrong. If you hit a bad run of form, fixtures or injuries, it also becomes perfectly reasonable to use a wildcard when you might previously have needed to hang tight.
Returning to the topic of being proactive in the early weeks, it also now becomes much less ‘expensive’ in terms of opportunity cost to use a very early wildcard to completely rejig your team once you have more information on who’s playing well and who isn’t getting on the pitch. In years gone by, you had to really need to change things up for it to be worth an early wildcard. Now, it’s much less impactful, and switching your team around into what appears to be the best squad possible once more information is available may be a good call.
Don’t get trapped by the old way of thinking – your chip strategy this year will be far more fluid, more personalised to your own team and not to the calendar, and they won’t make as much difference as they did before. Equally, don’t assume that chips are now just throwaways. If rolling over four or five transfers becomes normal, then wildcards are now quite cheap – but with the constant churn of the Premier League, I suspect it will be harder to get those free ‘extra wildcards’ than most people think.
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Hide AdUnless, of course, the ‘mystery chip’ does something spectacular. All we know at this stage is that there will be a brand new chip which is only available to use from January – and we won’t know what it does until later on this year. It could be huge, it could be underwhelming, and all we can say for sure for now is that as we haven’t got a clue, we just have to carry on as if it doesn’t exist right up until the point that it does.
Bonus points and goalie goals
Finally, there are a few (relatively minor) nudges to the bonus point system – and one change to the main points-scoring system, which will now award a goalkeeper 10 whole points in the unlikely event that they score a goal. Given that only one (Liverpool’s Alisson) has actually done so in the past decade and such an event can scarcely be planned for, it’s probably not worth changing your goalkeeper choice to account for it…
The bonus points system will still award up to three points to players in the same way based on what they did on the pitch, but the scoring system to determine who gets those points is different. Goalkeepers will now score less than they once did for a penalty save (a very minor change which doesn’t alter our goalkeeper choices) but will also take points away from goalkeepers and defenders for conceding.
Furthermore, players will now gain score towards bonus points for goal-line clearances, winning fouls and getting shots on target. This won’t make a huge difference but over the course of a season, expect that defenders will score two or three points less, while attackers who draw large numbers of fouls or take large numbers of shots will score a few more.
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Hide AdGenerally, this shouldn’t impact your team except as a tie-breaker – if you’re unable to decide, say, between Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka and a different midfielder, Saka will get a boost from some extra bonus points as he draws a huge number of fouls. Meanwhile, if you’re torn between a £4.5m defender or accommodating a £5.0m one instead, maybe go for the cheaper option as the potential ceiling for their points has been slightly reduced. But these are tie-breakers only, and shouldn’t be at the front of your mind when picking your team for the opening weekend.
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