Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 18 & 19: Hints and tips as Liverpool & Arsenal gear up for festive showdown

Welcome back to our regular Fantasy Premier League advice column, in which the head coach of our Top 1,000 team spills the beans on his strategies for FPL domination and helps you to navigate the tricky Christmas transfer market.

Today’s column will be doing double duty and will bring in both Gameweek 18 and 19, in order to allow him to spend Christmas Day chucking back colossal quantities of turkey rather than checking up on the latest price changes, so we’ll also give you a double warning – GW18’s deadline is on Thursday at 18:30 BST ahead of Crystal Palace’s sort-of-derby showdown against Brighton, while you’ll need to get your Boxing Day transfers done by 11:00 BST on 26 December. So don’t think you can have a lie-in to sleep all the Christmas booze off…

The big festive transfer decisions

Last week, the biggest question we asked and attempted to answer was whether or not to transfer Erling Haaland out. We decided that you should, at least once we knew he wasn’t going to be playing against Crystal Palace, and clearly a lot of people followed that advice given that his price dropped to £13.9m. Hey, that’s free money for everyone who’s going to bring him back in at the first opportunity.

The million-dollar question – or rather the £13.9m question – is now when to do that. As it stands, it seems unlikely that he plays in the Club World Cup, and given Pep Guardiola’s preference for keeping his press conference answers cryptic, it’s unlikely we get a proper update before the Boxing Day games. It’s essentially impossible to put a percentage on how likely he is to play against Everton.

Unless we get a clear indicator that he won’t line up at Goodison Park, we’re leaning towards bringing him back in for that week. The cost to not having him is potentially pretty high in terms of both points and pounds, as he’ll shoot back up to £14.0m and quite possibly beyond very, very quickly once Gameweek 18 is done. We’d rather gamble a little.

We’re slightly less inclined, however, to gamble on Kevin de Bruyne, who is close to a return but wasn’t ready to play against Urawa Red Diamonds in the Club World Cup semi-final on Tuesday. He’s a proven scorer, of course, but at £10.2m is he really going to consistently offer up more points than the likes of Bukayo Saka and Son Heung-Min? We’re not convinced, and don’t want to take a chance on him until we know he’s playing 90 minutes every week. Once we get there, however, buy quickly – because his price will shoot up once he establishes himself as an asset that players are keen to have their hands on again.

One player who has firmly re-established himself as a favourite is Trent Alexander-Arnold, who has overtaken the suddenly struggling Kieran Trippier as the highest-scoring defender in the game and seen his price spike to £8.2m, a mark which is likely to go up shortly after the GW18 deadline. If you’re in a position to move from Trippier to Trent then we definitely recommend it based on recent form, but Liverpool do have a mixed bag of fixtures coming up, so we don’t see this as an essential buy just yet, although it may well become so very soon.

The biggest issue with signing Alexander-Arnold, however, is simply that it’s very difficult to fit him into a team alongside all of the other regular haulers. It’s basically impossible to construct a team which has Haaland and Ollie Watkins up front, Mohamed Salah, Bukayo Saka and Son in midfield, and Alexander-Arnold as well, unless you’ve done astonishingly well in the transfer market so far – and the blunt fact is that Alexander-Arnold hasn’t been scoring points at the same rate as any of those other players. He’s probably the best defender in the game, but his prohibitive price point means we only really want him in if we reach a point where one of the others fall away or gets injured, and we can’t see where that point comes for any of the other premium players. You’ll see our current team a little later on, and right now, we reckon that’s roughly the best template to follow.

When do we think that template might change and open up a slot for the Liverpool right-back? Well, one possibility is when Manchester City’s Jérémy Doku comes back to full fitness. He’s a cheap player who’s thrown up several big hauls, so we can definitely imagine a world in which we play him over, say, Son or Saka, and thus make room for Alexander-Arnold that way. But the point at which things will definitely change comes with GW21, when Salah and Son are among the players heading off for the Africa Cup of Nations and Asian Cup. At that stage, the money will be freed up for Alexander-Arnold to become a part of the template, but we'll discuss how to handle those transfers in more details nearer the time.

Injuries, price changes and captain picks

Haaland, Doku and De Bruyne aren’t the only players whose fitness is causing headaches right now – Anthony Gordon, Pau Torres, Alexander Isak, Fabian Schär, Vitalii Mykolenko, Robert Sánchez and Harry Maguire are all injured and all liable to miss at least some minutes over the festive period, but with many teams not hosting press conferences at helpful times (most of this weekend’s pressers will take place after the transfer deadline has passed), we’re going to be doing a lot of guessing. All we can do is mitigate with transfers as much as possible, and make sure we’re always getting a half-decent XI playing even if we do have to dip into the bench. Try not to panic if you’ve got a few red or yellow triangles floating about – remember that it’s you and everyone else in the world right now…

Suspensions are also an issue worth tracking, with players like Destiny Udogie and Raúl Jiménez both out for at least one match thanks to their indiscretions – and before making your changes you should double-check that you don’t have too many players who are one yellow card away from missing a game. Joachim Andersen, Kristoffer Ajer, Kai Havertz, Matty Cash, Vladimír Coufal, Kaoru Mitoma, Jamaal Lascelles, Issa Kaboré, Hwang Hee-Chan, Cristian Romero, Raheem Sterling, Cole Palmer and Darwin Núñez are all on the long, long list of players who will miss a match sooner rather than later.

As for price changes, we’ve already warned you that Alexander-Arnold will be £8.3m before too long, while Dominic Solanke, Callum Wilson, Emiliano Martínez, Mohammed Kudus and Salah may all rise soon, too. Luís Diaz, Neto and Cameron Archer are among the players who might lose some value before too long.

For the captain’s chip over the next two gameweeks, we’re recommending Ollie Watkins over Son Heung-Min for this weekend. Son is superb but Everton, Spurs’ opponents, are on great form and after four consecutive clean sheets may not ship too many. For GW19, we’d likely move across to Salah – he has a trip to Turf Moor to look forward to, and Burnley haven’t been quite so sturdy at the back lately.

3 Added Minutes FC

Finally, a quick check-in with our example team, which is back in the global Top 1,000 once more after a good week, despite the unexpected disappointment of Isak missing out on the squad after we brought him in to cover for Haaland, and despite our chosen captain Son turning out to be our lowest-scoring player. Such is life...

We’re keeping a close eye on injury updates but despite all the yellow triangles will most likely stand pat this week, as it’s relatively unlikely that all three players who are doubts miss out, and while our defensive replacements are uninspiring, we don’t see a reason to panic – and nor can we really see a striker we’re all that fussed about switching Isak out for. He may well play and score anyway…

When GW19 rolls around we’ll mainly be worrying about whether to bring Haaland back in or not, and he’ll come straight in for Isak if so. Otherwise, with the amount of rotation that tends to happen over this time of the year, we’ll probably aim to be reactive with our transfers rather than following a carefully-laid plan. Those tend to go out of the window until things settle back down in January.

That’s all for this week – may all of your Christmasses be merry and made all the more so by a sackful of points from all of your players. Happy holidays!