Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 19: wildcards, who to captain & Saka alternative ahead of West Ham v Liverpool

The festive fixtures are coming thick and fast, and keeping up with the Fantasy Premier League whilst simultaneously honouring a string of family commitments and finding time to motor through two dozen leftover sandwiches isn’t easy – luckily, our resident expert, fresh from last season’s Top 2,000 finish, is here to help out.

This week, he’s going to discuss wildcards, with the first set to expire ahead of the Gameweek 19 deadline and the second available right after. Should you use your most valuable chip straight away? And what does the perfect team look like? All that and more below ahead of the 13:00 GMT deadline on Sunday 29 December…

A walk on the wildcard side

Let’s start with the admin – the first wildcard chip offered to FPL players expires with the GW19 deadline, so if you haven’t used it yet then use it now or lose it. It doesn’t roll over and you can’t have two wildcards available at once, so using it is the only sensible thing to do.

The second wildcard, meanwhile, will be available ahead of the Gameweek 20 deadline on 4 January, and a lot of players who are struggling will be tempted to use it to try and start making up some ground, while a serious injury to Bukayo Saka will encourage quite a few players to make changes too. But should you burn the biggest chip in the game right away?

The likely answer for most players is no. Mostly, that’s because there will be three partial double gameweeks later in the season, and two which will be blanks for a handful of teams. Those weeks are smaller and less influential than they have been in the past thanks to the a schedule shake-up, but they still matter, and saving chips in order to hit them as hard as possible could be crucial. The first is just over a month away – Liverpool and Everton will play their rescheduled fixture on 11 February, which will likely get tacked on to GW24. There are other ways to use chips for that fixture, but wildcarding a week ahead of time to get triple Liverpool in your team is one way to get in good shape.

Of course, if you have a slew of injuries or have simply fallen miles behind in your mini-league, there’s every argument for using your wildcard as a form of emergency surgery. It’s like signing differentials earlier than planned – if you’re desperate, it’s the kind of play that might just help you claw back lost ground. But for those managers whose straits are sufficiently dire to use that wildcard right off the bat, what does the ideal team look like?

One thing I can’t easily do is offer up a one size fits all squad here, because everyone will have different team values at this stage of the season, but I can offer up what I believe to be the best £100.0m squad you could have right now by way of a template for people using their wildcards this week and as inspiration for those who might use it after Sunday’s deadline – and you can decide on your ideal upgrades for whatever money you have in excess of that budget (or which downgrades you’ll have to make if things have gone really badly). This is a starting point, at least:

This actually comes in at just £99.7m, but there were no major upgrades I could see with that £0.3m so I’d bank the cash for future use. Players with more money available, or who have had expensive assets like Mohamed Salah from the start, could do even more with their cash, but this should be a solid starting point for most teams.

So what was the process which got me here? Well, I started with what I consider to be some absolute essentials for the next month or so, at least – Salah and plenty of Chelsea players. Salah is the best player in the game, playing for the best team in the Premier League and on the form of his life, and even teams in need of differentials should stick with him and look to find an edge elsewhere. Chelsea, meanwhile, have the best run of fixtures in the division – Cole Palmer is essential and while Nicolas Jackson’s form has dipped in recent weeks, I would back him to come good again.

After those starting points, I’m looking at teams’ fixtures and form and seeing where I think I’ll find plenty of points – that includes the Newcastle United attack now that Anthony Gordon and Alexander Isak are finding their feet again and the Nottingham Forest defence. I don’t blame anyone for wanting Chris Wood, either, but on current form I think Gakpo has a higher ceiling.

One oddity is the lack of Arsenal assets – they have some up-and-down fixtures coming up, their form has been solid but unspectacular, and only the stricken Saka has really proven to be a first-rate asset outside of defenders. If I had some more cash to spend, I’d upgrade a defender to Gabriel or William Saliba, but this is a budget-conscious template team, and that’s one of the easier sacrifices to make in my opinion. Goalkeepers and defenders simply score less than other players, so that’s where you should make your savings first. It would also be perfectly reasonable to sign a £4.0m-ish ‘bench and forget’ defender and spend that money elsewhere in the team, although I’d probably save it for future spending myself. Moving to Trent Alexander-Arnold in a few weeks will be an expensive business, after all.

Even if you disagree with some of the individual choices here, I think this is still the best fundamental template with Saka out of the game for a while and Erling Haaland struggling mightily – two premium midfielders alongside two budget options in the same position, and more money spent up front than in defence, with either Jordan Pickford or Matz Sels in goal.

What about this week?

With the wildcard chat out of the way, let’s also take a look at some of the specifics coming up in Gameweek 19 – starting with my recommendation for the captain’s armband.

It’s pretty hard to look past Cole Palmer this week. The theory that you should simply always captain Salah and stop overthinking things holds plenty of water, but West Ham United have improved of late and while it’s not exactly hard to imagine Salah scoring again, Palmer gets a crack at Ipswich Town’s defence. Hardly any teams in the FPL won’t have one of the other, anyway, which is good news for them, because it’s very hard to make a good statistical case for any other options under the current circumstances.

If you’re making minor adjustments with your transfers this week, we would advise you to try and make sure your bench options aren’t too bad, either – with the games coming thick and fast, regular starters are going to get benched at odd moments and you are far more likely to need a couple of subs over the Christmas and New Year period than you are for the rest of the year. Proceed accordingly and don’t leave too many injured or suspended players in your team just to save transfers.

As for what the players stuck with Saka should do now that he’s out of the picture for a month or two – well, the obvious answer is to move across to Palmer or Salah if you don’t have them, but plenty will, and for such players I’d be looking to use two transfers to invest up front and buy in a cheaper option in Saka’s stead. A lot of players won’t have Isak or Jackson right now, and both seem to be likely big scorers in the coming weeks. Saka’s price will inevitably be hit hard by his injury, so selling him sooner rather than later is the best plan, but I’d be prepared to lose a bit of money before I took a -4 right now to make a double transfer. I don’t think waiting a week is a crime.

That’s all for this week – best of luck, may all of your wildcards work out well whenever you use them, and have a very happy New Year.