Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 20: Hints, tips and New Year’s resolutions before Spurs play Newcastle

A brand new year is here but the Fantasy Premier League grind remains unchanged – and our resident expert, Matthew Gregory, is back once more with his latest FPL hints and tips column for Gameweek 20 to help you keep the points flowing in 2025.

Today, he offers up some ideas for New Year’s resolutions as he tries to develop better processes for reliable points scoring, suggests the best ways to replace Matheus Cunha and Jarrod Bowen, and picks out the best buys and captain choices before Tottenham Hotspur host Newcastle United to start the gameweek off on Saturday – and don’t forget to get all of your selections sorted by 11:00 GMT on 4 January to avoid missing the deadline. Over to Matthew…

Binning off your bad FPL habits

As most people blearily work through their New Year’s Eve hangovers and try to focus on those five weekly gym sessions they promised themselves, I’m taking a different tack with my resolutions for 2025 – I’m going to try and get better at FPL.

None of us are perfect players, of course, but after getting used to some pretty high finishes over the years I’ve been struggling this season, and I’ve been keen to figure out why so I can make sure I’m offering the best possible advice to our readers, finish strongly and, more importantly, give myself a good position to gloat with. Priorities.

That process of self-reflection has led me to draw up a short list of three Fantasy Premier League resolutions for the New Year for myself and I thought I’d share them with you before getting down to the nitty-gritty of GW20 in the hope that they make all of us slightly better (and more consistent) players.

Just captain Salah: There are two primary reasons that I’ve fallen from last year’s Top 2,000 finish to a rather more modest ranking this time around. One was my grim determination to stick with Erling Haaland for too long before switching across to Mohamed Salah, and the other has been failing to give Salah the armband every single week since I finally signed him.

The former error had some logic behind it – I simply didn’t see Manchester City’s fall from grace lasting as long as it did, for which I’m not sure I entirely blame myself – but the latter represented a failure to follow form and trends which I can’t permit to happen again.

Simply put, Salah wasn’t just scoring at a record-breaking rate, the stats behind his output (expected goals, chances created and so on) suggested that he could keep it up, and I ignored them because I convinced myself that having Haaland would be the right play in the long run. Then, to compound, the issue, I kept failing to give Salah the captain’s armband.

When a player is scoring so frequently and so freely (Salah hasn’t drawn a blank since GW7) then the strength of their fixtures is simply less important. In GW19, I gave Cole Palmer the armband and regretted it as I watched Salah haul once more in an allegedly trickier game. The moral of the story is that proven FPL assets who are on top form will score points more often than other players who have a slightly easier game. Nearly 90% of the currently Top 10K in the game captained Salah this week – that’s not a coincidence.

Stop fussing about fixture difficulty: If there is one tab on the FPL app that I’ve learned to distrust this season, it’s the one marked Fixture Difficulty – because those bright greens and deep reds simply don’t line up with reality very often.

The fact is that the best teams, the ones challenging for the Premier League title, win games that are meant to be a bit tougher. Just as Liverpool will probably win (and Salah probably score) if they’re away to Newcastle or Spurs, an out-of-form team like Manchester United won’t suddenly start banging them in just because they get a game against Ipswich Town.

While it’s still reasonable to sell less important players who run into really tough runs of fixtures and to sign players from teams who are about to play all the relegation candidates in a row, it’s far more important to sign players who are on form and play for teams who are on form. Until you play your assistant manager chip, you won’t get points for final scores – only for goals, assists and clean sheets, and good players keep getting those.

As an example, I recently sold Bryan Mbeumo from my team because Brentford’s fixtures got harder. He has promptly scored three times in his last five, all against teams that flashed up bright red on the planner. Worry about the players, not their opponents, and you will score more points – use your transfers to follow their form, and don’t worry so much about which players you suspect will struggle because they’re about to play tougher teams.

Don’t keep sacred cows: This one circles right back to my disastrous mistake over Haaland and Salah – no matter how convinced you are that some players are worth keeping around, as soon as the stats and form say otherwise, it’s time to move on.

Eventually, there might come a point when Salah’s form (or perhaps his team’s) nosedives. Maybe the pressure grows as the title gets closer, maybe there are a bunch of injuries, maybe Salah just hits a rocky patch. When that happens, sell him, no matter how good he’s been for however long.

Had I looked past my own biases with Haaland, I would have noted that while his own stats in terms of xG and finishing were pretty stable, the team around him was creating far, far less in terms of opportunities for him. I assumed he had to come good soon, but the raw data said that Manchester City were playing badly, and I should have respected that and sold him for Salah much sooner. I’d be many, many points better off if I had.

Similarly, if we get to a point where City start playing better and Haaland stars getting chances in any respectable volume, get him back in the fold quickly. Last year, I was successful in part because I pounced on trends quickly and let high-scoring players go at the right moments, while keeping it simple with players like Haaland and Bukayo Saka, playing them week on week regardless of their opponents. Had I fully appreciated which parts of the process worked so well, then I would have done better this time out. A lot of it boils down to using stats to see which players are going to hit form and which are going to fall away, and otherwise just keeping it simple and trusting the best players. Lesson learned for 2025…

Who to captain in FPL Gameweek 20 and how to replace Cunha & Bowen

I usually use a part of this last section of my column discussing which players to consider for the captain’s armband, but as previously mentioned – it’s Salah. Manchester United at home is not a tricky fixture right now, and his form is just too good to overlook. Other usual suspects for the armband are either injured (Saka) or on less consistent form (Palmer), so don’t overthink this week’s decision.

There will come a point down the line at which teams who are struggling for points and need to make up ground in their mini-leagues will want to seek differentials, and not captaining Salah is one way to do that, but this early on and with form as it is, it’s just safer to skipper Salah and not think too hard about it.

A few players will also have to make some unplanned changes to their line-ups thanks to the enforced absences of Wolves striker Matheus Cunha (who has been banned for two matches) and West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen, who is out for around a month thanks to a fractured foot – so who do we replace them with?

Up front, the form picks are Alexander Isak and Chris Wood, and unless you have multiple free transfers to make moves with it’s more than likely that Wood is the man you should sign. An upcoming match against Liverpool might worry some, but their other fixtures are gentle and lest we forget, Nottingham Forest won at Anfield earlier in the season. Wood has been consistently excellent, as has his team. Harking back to some earlier advice, don’t overthink this one…

Similarly, once Cunha is back from his suspension, signing him for some other striker makes plenty of sense. No matter how much Wolves are struggling over the course of this campaign, he’s scoring freely and has overtaken Haaland in the overall points table. Sell him to avoid a price drop and to make sure you don’t miss out on points for the coming weeks, but don’t overthink re-signing him, either. If you already have Wood and need another cheap striker, Yoane Wissa’s underlying stats continue to be highly impressive and Brentford could easily score a healthy number of goals against teams like Manchester City, especially at home

Replacing Bowen is more about picking out the best mid-price midfielder – and that’s either Mbeumo, Luis Díaz or Anthony Gordon just now, especially with James Maddison benched for the last couple of Spurs games. Díaz was recently given a rest game but has been getting plenty of 90s of late and has three goals in his last two games, but tends to blow hot only for short periods. Mbeumo is more consistent… but it’s Gordon that I’m leaning towards as a long-term solution.

The Newcastle winger is really hitting his stride after a slow start to the season and while Díaz has been hitting higher xG and xA marks for the last few games, he’s historically fallen away from his bright patches quickly. I would expect the Colombian to be a better asset for the next two or three weeks, and Gordon to likely be better over the course of the season.

Some players will also be gearing up to use an early wildcard given that the second wildcard is now available following the turn of the year - if that’s you, I covered the best strategy for maximising your most important chip in last week’s column, so feel free to take a look there to help out.

That’s all for this week – may you all stick to whatever New Year’s resolutions you end up making, and may you all please learn from my mistakes and just captain Mo Salah. Until next time…