Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 13: Get ready to sell Spurs & Man City and bet big on Chelsea

Another deadline looms and that means it’s time to dip back into the world of the Fantasy Premier League and to find out what our resident FPL expert thinks we should do with our transfers this week.

Today our man Matthew Gregory, the owner of a Top 2,000 finish from last season, takes a look at some changes we might need to make to our teams in the near future and looks at clubs we need to buy into and sell out from – but before we hand over, it’s our duty to remind you that it’s a Friday deadline this week, and you’ll need to get your Gameweek 13 decisions done by 18:30 GMT on 29 November.

Selling Man City or all-in on Arsenal?

I’m going to kick things off which a short, simple piece of advice which is probably the most important I’ll give you in this entire column – you probably shouldn’t make any transfers this week.

Partly, that’s because very few teams see a significant shift in difficulty from their last fixture to this, so if your team was set up sensibly then there probably won’t be too many major fires to put out this time around. Crucially, though, several teams do start to see swings in the strength of their schedule very soon, and that makes this a really good time to roll a transfer and save it for when it’s needed more urgently.

With that in mind, I’m going to take a look at which teams (and therefore which players) we should be buying and selling over the coming weeks – and which to prioritise.

Let’s start with Chelsea and Arsenal. Both teams are moving rapidly towards a run of relatively gentle games, especially from GW16 onwards. Chelsea, in particular, have an extremely soft string of matches (by Premier League standards, of course) which runs from GW16 all the way to GW23, when they visit the Etihad. That’s a run in which most teams will want, at a minimum, two Chelsea players and perhaps the full three.

Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson are the obvious places to start and moving towards them makes a lot of sense. That doesn’t mean they need to be in place this week, just that I’d strongly recommend mapping out your transfers to get there. The next best Chelsea player depends on your team structure, but if Noni Madueke keeps getting minutes then he’ll be a solid buy, as will Levi Colwill and maybe Malo Gusto.

With Arsenal also entering a gentler run of games and with a morale-boosting win over Nottingham Forest in their back pocket (meaning that their recent poor form feels like a while ago already), I’d also want to invest in their assets – Bukayo Saka will always be at the top of the shopping list, but Gabriel and William Saliba are sensible investments too, along with Martin Ødegaard now he’s back in the game.

I’m also looking at Liverpool assets after the next couple of weeks – once some tough games are out of the way we’ll see them in rather less choppy waters for a while, so after Chelsea and Arsenal players, that’s where I’m headed. Brighton & Hove Albion players are starting to look good too, although aside from João Pedro their points come from all angles, which makes picking individual players trickier. Giorginio Rutter is an interesting gambler’s option.

Of course, you also have to figure out who to flog to make room. Teams whose opponents get harder soon include Brentford, Forest, Manchester City and, to a certain extent, Tottenham Hotspur. So I’m looking at a future where Son Heung-Min becomes Saka or Palmer, for instance, or where Chris Wood turns into João Pedro – after Forest’s home game against Ipswich Town this weekend, of course. I must admit that I’m still not advocating for selling Erling Haaland but if you disagree and do want to get rid of him, then do it sooner rather than later.

One of the trickiest things when figuring out forward planning, however, isn’t just who to sell and who to buy but who to prioritise. Short of using a wildcard, it’s relatively unlikely that we can sign everyone we want, after all. So if you calculate, for instance, that you can only get one of Palmer or Jackson in, how do you decide which is more important?

A key element is replaceability. Ideally, we’d want a midfield with Saka, Palmer and Mohamed Salah all at the same time, but may not be able to do the financial gymnastics necessary to make that happen. At that point, the difference in likely value between any given two of them is relatively small - but the difference between Jackson’s likely output over the course of that soft run of games and that of, say, Chris Wood or Yoane Wissa when their opponents are much harder is likely to be considerably greater. That makes turning a Wood into a Jackson more important that switching one premium midfielder for another.

The same logic means that replacing defenders is much less important that replacing midfielders or strikers. Defenders score far fewer points and have a much lower ceiling to what they can realistically do – the occasional Trent Alexander-Arnold run notwithstanding – than players further forward, so you will have a much higher chance of making a difference in other positions. It might be lovely to pick up Colwill or maybe Gusto for your squad, but switching over to a Jackson is much more likely to make a big difference.

You’re more likely to experience a big swing in points – positive or negative! – with deals with see players changed for considerably more or less expensive options at the same positions, and by prioritising midfielders, then strikers, then defenders. It’s for that reason that while it might be tempting to sign Fraser Foster as a cheap goalkeeper who will now play because of Guglielmo Vicario’s fractured ankle, it’s only worth it if you either desperately need a new goalkeeper or if you have the transfers to burn. Given how many priorities you probably have coming up, it’s unlikely that you have that many.

Another point worth making that may be obvious to many is that you can less value out of transferring players out when the outgoing player still has good fixtures. For instance, if you have Son and want Saka, that’s a logical move but why do it when Son has a home game against Fulham? Maybe you want to switch Wood for João Pedro, but don’t do it when they have a game against Ipswich to come. Always try to drive the biggest possible wedge between the value of the player you buy and that of the player you sell.

Captain picks & 3 Added Minutes FC

This is very definitely one of the toughest captain choices of the season so far and I think if you asked 20 different players who they’d pick you’d get at least 10 different answers. Most of the usual suspects have a game that’s either tricky or at least a potential banana skin, and choosing between players like Haaland, Salah, Palmer and Saka is really a lottery.

Which means that this is the kind of week where going for a bit of a gamble has less of a cost. Bryan Mbeumo, for instance, is a great shout with Brentford facing a home game against Leicester City, and he’s scoring at the same sort of rate as the more expensive midfielders anyway. João Pedro is absolutely worth a punt, too. But if you’re feeling risk averse or are well ahead in your mini-league and don’t want a differential, go with form – and that means Salah or Saka.

As always, we’re going to wrap up with an update from my example team, 3 Added Minutes FC – and to be honest, that week was absolutely rubbish, my first real stinker in a while. Only Jarrod Bowen and Lukas Fabianski had the decency to offer me any returns, and all my star players blanked completely. I still think the process to get to this team at this point was pretty solid, but sometimes you just have the wrong assets for the wrong week. It will even out. Probably. Hopefully…

Following my own advice, I won’t be making any transfers this week unless there’s a surprise injury issue. Son will become Saka very soon and I’ll probably move Wood and Wissa on too, but with them all having favourable matches this week I’ll leave them be and roll the transfer for now to maximise their value.

That’s all for this week – may all of your decisions work out better than mine did in Gameweek 12, and may all of your forward planning work out perfectly.