Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 7: Hints, tips and the best budget enablers before Aston Villa face Man Utd

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The best budget enablers are this week’s focus as our resident FPL expert offers up his regular dose of hints and tips.

It only feels like five minutes ago that Cole Palmer was making half of the Fantasy Premier League world very happy indeed and the other half absolutely miserable, but here we are again – Gameweek 7 is only just around the corner and it’s time for our latest hints and tips column.

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As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, I think it’s only fair to start by apologising to anybody who followed by wildcarding advice last weekend, because I was one of the 55% of fools who didn’t end up with Palmer in my team, and as such am in the ‘deeply frustrated’ camp who was left side-eyeing Bukayo Saka instead. We press on, however, and hopefully my advice this week will be more in tune with last season’s Top 2,000 finish.

Before I crack on with today’s column – which aside from the usual advice, captaincy recommendations and the like, will focus on the best budget enablers in the FPL going forward – a quick reminder that we’re once again looking at a Saturday morning transfer deadline, with all of our decisions needing to be made by 11:00 BST on 5 October.

How to keep it cheap and cheerful

If there’s one thing that Palmer’s exploits this weekend got my thinking about, it’s how to construct a team which contains Saka, Palmer and Erling Haaland while actually having competent players at other positions – but to build such a team going forward, it’s critical to work out the best budget enablers, because cheap players who actually put up points are one of the most important commodities in the game.

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If you have midfielders that cost less than £6.0m but still put up points, for instance, it makes everything else ten times easier to figure out and ensures that you have the breathing space to get all the best players in elsewhere. But how do you figure out which cheap players are the right ones to buy?

Sadly, it isn’t as simple as just looking at which cheap players have scored the most points so far and picking them, because a small sample size of games means that we are probably overvaluing a few players who have scored some goals but won’t carry on doing so – and, of course, vice versa. What you want to avoid is a case of Josh Dasilva Syndrome, which is when the Brentford defender scored twice in two games early in the 2022/23 season, everyone bought him, and he rapidly regressed right back to the mean. It’s not about who’s scored points so far, but who will score points going forward.

So how do you pick out which players are here to stay and which are likely to struggle as the season goes on? Your best bet is to dig into the stats. For defenders, that means looking at which players are actually putting up expected goals and assists and which are playing for teams who actually keep things tight at the back.

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In truth, defenders are the ones you can afford to get wrong. The chances are that you will have a £4.0m defender in your squad already with no real intention of ever playing him. There’s every argument for having two such players. The only thing that truly matters is that they play every week so that if one of your ‘better’ defenders should get injured or dropped, the player who comes in at least gets on the pitch to pick up two points.

There are a few popular £4.0m defenders, all of whom have been relatively low-scoring so far – Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Wout Faes have bagged a goal but been scarcely any more likely to do so than Jacob Greaves, Axel Tuanzebe, Michael Keane and Roman Bednarek.

Expected goals tells us that Greaves, Harwood-Bellis and Faes are our best bets based on the last couple of seasons, presumably because of the threat they pose from corners – but more important may be the number of expected goals their teams as a whole are conceding, as that impacts the chances of a clean sheet. On that basis, it’s Everton who come out on top, but Keane will surely be losing his place to Jarrad Branthwaite before long. After that, it’s Southampton who edge ahead, followed by Ipswich Town, with Leicester City giving up the most chances of any team so far this season.

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They’re all pretty bad defences and all defenders who are unlikely to bag points, but you still have to play the odds – for instance, the 3.6% of players with Tuanzebe are simply making a mistake, because he’s the least likely to score and less likely than Harwood-Bellis to keep a clean sheet. Harwood-Bellis and Greaves look like the two best bets.

Still, it’s close and almost certainly not worth using a transfer to fix – it’s the midfielders and strikers that matter more, by a long way, because they actually need to be on the pitch from time to time. This is where our seasons will be made or broken.

Defining ‘budget enabler’ is a little tricky in midfield because the prices start to diverge a bit, but let’s assume we’re talking players who are below £6.0m. Most teams will want two such players to be able to fit the big names in, and there are plenty of options.

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Dwight McNeil (£5.6m) leads the scoring so far with 39 points, with Emile Smith Rowe (£5.8m) just behind on 33. Antoine Semenyo, Adama Traoré, Morgan Rogers are close behind, and all told no fewer than 18 sub-£6.0m midfielders have at least 20 points already. But the stats make our decisions a little easier.

Heading onto the FPL website and sorting the players by expected goal involvements gives us a bit more of an insight into how likely any given players are to sustain their scoring form. McNeil also comes top my that metric too, for instance, and has plainly become the focal point of the Everton attack even though he has seldom been a consistent goal threat before – but Semenyo is only just behind, as is his team-mate Marcus Tavernier, who may be flying a little under the radar.

These stats aren’t perfect (not least because the way FPL measures and awards assists often ignores typical statistical models entirely) but they do give us some indications. For instance, they tell us that Aston Villa’s Rogers is probably over-rated right now and passes the eye test more easily than he scores points – West Ham’s Tomáš Souček, for instance, has more points, more expected goals and assists, and a lower price point. Similarly, Smith Rowe just isn’t as likely to score in any given week as Semenyo or McNeil, despite being more expensive.

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Of course, some common sense needs to be applied, as these are small statistical sample sizes and will be skewed. Souček might be doing better than Rogers now, but Rogers plays in a more advances position and is improving by the month, and as a long-term hold is probably going to be better. Similarly, McNeil has had a great start to the season but he’s scoring screamers rather than tapping good team moves in – he will likely regress at some point. The key is using stats to spot bargains like Semenyo without over-using them and getting infected with some of that dreaded Dasilva Syndrome.

It's also worth keeping an eye on how players are getting on given the minutes they’ve actually played. McNeil leads the way in points and expected goals and assists in total, but he has an almost identical xGA per game to Georginio Rutter, who missed the first few games of the Brighton season. A slightly cheaper option than McNeil, he’s one to keep an eye on going forward.

Finally, let’s take a look at the strikers. There are a few sub-£6.0m strikers making waves, leaving the injured Yoane Wissa aside. Danny Welbeck leads the way with 33 points, Chris Wood has 31, and plenty of people have set some stock in the (currently crocked) João Pedro, Jhon Durán, Jamie Vardy, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Raúl Jiménez. In other words, there are quite a few options available.

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So sub-£6.0m striker is getting in the most points-scoring positions? None of the above. It’s Bournemouth’s Evanilson, who has 2.73xGA right now and recently scored his first Cherries goal against Southampton. You can interpret that as meaning that he’ll be a flop who won’t score as many as he should, but he had a solid conversion rate at Porto and he could be a good surprise investment.

As for the players who feel like less of an unknown quantity, Welbeck edges Wood out as the best player so far but Wood is surely more likely to get 90 minutes going forward now that players like Rutter and Evan Ferguson are back to full fitness down on the south coast. Pedro is a bit behind those two in terms of goal involvements per game, so we’d steer clear for now, even ignoring his injury. We’d also give Vardy and Jiménez a wide berth.

Captain picks and 3 Added Minutes FC

With all that said, we still need to provide our captaincy picks for this week – and it’s Erling Haaland. Of course it is. You can make a case for players like Saka and Mohamed Salah when Manchester City have a tough game, and you can debate the merits of picking midfielders over strikers, but Haaland can’t stop scoring and even though Fulham have had a really good start to the season, we can’t see the Norwegian firing blanks at the Etihad this weekend. Saka would be our back-up if we were one of the people insisting on not signing Haaland because they like a challenge or something.

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As far our freshly-wildcarded team? Well, I’d have liked more than 44 points to my name and feel foolish for not spotting that I should have had Semenyo over Smith Rowe sooner, but I still like the team going forward in all regards apart from the fact that I don’t have Palmer. That’s something I’ll rectify when I can, but I’ll need more free transfers.

How 3 Added Minutes FC are lining up this weekHow 3 Added Minutes FC are lining up this week
How 3 Added Minutes FC are lining up this week | Fantasy Premier League

Here’s what my team looks like heading into next week – no transfers, and no I don’t actually expect Łukasz Fabiański to play, but it makes sense to set him as the starter just in case something happens to Alphonse Aréola. Hopefully my fortunes turn, as I’m not used to having a rank measured in the millions and it’s rather annoying.

Anyway, that combination of griping and gentle self-aggrandizement aside, that’s the end of this week’s column – best of luck to all of you and may your cheap enablers all continue to pile up the points. See you next week.

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