How to build the perfect Fantasy Premier League team including Liverpool and Newcastle stars - part one

At 6.30pm on Friday evening – by a British clock, anyway – the time for talking and transferring will be over, and your Fantasy Premier League team will be locked in, your work league fate sealed. So… we’d better start with the best team possible, right?

Today we’re going to give you the full rundown on how to set up your FPL team to maximise your points and bragging rights – from selecting players to formations to knowing when to take a gamble, and when to hold off just a little. To break it down a little bit, we’re going to do this in two parts – in this article we’ll focus on picking your premium players and formation, which should generally be your starting point, and then in part two we’ll look at the finer details and choosing the players that will fill out your fifteen.

1. How to pick your big hitters

In brief, the best set-up for a Fantasy Premier League team is to pick the handful of highest-scoring players in the game, and surround them with the best-scoring cheaper players available. Which seems obvious, perhaps, but it’s essentially impossible to pick all of the game’s premium players – so you have to choose your targets carefully, and consider how they will affect the quality of the rest of your team.

As it stands, 86.5% of FPL players have picked Erling Haaland, and it’s hard to argue with them after a towering 272 point debut season. The only way you can sensibly argue against his inclusion is if you want to sign Harry Kane instead, which may well be reasonable (he only scored nine fewer points last year and costs £1.5m less) – but the chances of his leaving Spurs simply seem to be too high as it stands to make that a sensible chance to take. The insensible argument against Haaland is that he didn’t play well against Arsenal in the Community Shield – if that thought crosses your mind, please bear in mind that he was awful in the same game last season, and went on to score 52 goals.

So you should almost certainly have Haaland, at least unless Kane public announces that he will stay for another season – but what about the likes of Mohamed Salah, Kevin de Bruyne and Trent Alexander-Arnold? In a moment we’ll look at a few sample templates for teams which include those players so you can see how it impacts your selection, but let’s start by working out who the best of the remaining premium players are likely to be.

The first thing to remember is that you aren’t forced to hold on to them forever. Like every other player in your team they can be transferred in and out according to form, fitness and fixtures – picking Salah, say, isn’t a statement of intent. So if you think that Manchester City’s relatively soft start to the season means that De Bruyne is the right player for the start of the season but not for the long haul, then take him and make a plan to move him out for Salah when the time is right.

And Liverpool, who have two of the “premium” players in Salah and Alexander-Arnold, do have a fairly tough start to the season – and are very much in transition, with a huge midfield overhaul happening and their front line unsettled. Liverpool may well be very good this season, but it would hardly be an astronomical shock if they started slowly – for that reason, Salah at £12.5m and Alexander-Arnold at £8.0m may be harder to justify.

As you’ll see from this first template below, it’s pretty damned hard to fit three of the big names in at the same time without some serious compromises…

However, while this draft excludes quite a few very good players, it probably is close to where we want to end up in the long run. The tricky bit is that we can only guess who the high-scoring cheap players will be – so using a template like this is likely to have lower short-term returns but end up in a good place because we can move around the cheaper players without having to work out how to, say, turn a £8.5m midfielder into Salah. It’s easier to manage transfers if you start with the high-value players, so I don’t blame anyone for maximising that end of the team at the very beginning.

Let’s take a look now at a slightly more middle-ground approach, with Alexander-Arnold removed but Salah kept in.

As you can see, we now get to add an extra “semi-premium” player, in this case Marcus Rashford, and move away from having two extra-cheap defenders. In the short term, this will likely net us more points, especially given that Rashford is liable to score plenty in his own right, while maintaining a large amount of autonomy on our transfers. If you think that Liverpool’s potentially tricky opening to the season will reduce Alexander-Arnold’s returns, this is a strong place to start.

Of course, if having Salah allows us to expand the strength of the rest of our team, it’s fair to wonder what will happen if we exclude him as well. Opting out of Salah has historically been a bad move – he’s hit 200 points or more in each of his six seasons at Liverpool, which is otherwise unheard-of consistency – but with so many mid-range midfielders like Bukayo Saka, Bruno Fernandes and Rashford in the mix, there’s definitely an argument to at least start without him for once…

As we can see, taking Salah out of the equation allows us to be strong almost right across the park. Those high-level mid-price midfielders could easily come close to Salah’s scoring rate, and the points made up by having an £8.0m striker, for instance, should net us more points than having Salah will. The downside is that, while this will likely be a great place to start the season, in the long run there will be a better combination of players that includes the very highest scorers – which most likely will involve Salah – and some cheaper assets. So this formation gives us a great chance of a strong start but puts a lot of pressure on our transfers going forward to get towards an optimum squad.

Taking everything into consideration, going to a Haaland-only team is a hard sell, but your decision should come down to how well you feel the individual players will do to start. If you think Alexander-Arnold will struggle for points for the first few weeks, avoid him and bring him in later. By the same token, a player we briefly mentioned earlier, De Bruyne, throws an interesting spanner in the works at £10.5m – fit and firing, he can hit Salah levels easily while saving money, but it’s not entirely clear that he will be ready to start the season opener at Burnley. Having him instead of Salah could give you a halfway option between the second and third drafts which offers something resembling the best of both worlds. Or it could be a disaster, should he sit on the bench for a while…

Of course, you could try and go for both. Let’s see what that looks like as a starting point…

Our initial instinct is that starting with someone like Saka or Fernandes is probably safer – but, like the Alexander-Arnold template, this could be a great target to aim for down the road, and if De Bruyne is definitely fit and ready for the trip to Turf Moor, then this becomes a reasonable starting point.

You’ll note that we’ve generally stuck with the same players at different price points in our templates – we’ll go into more details about picking how these players should be chosen in part two, but hopefully these give you an idea of some of the options and help you visualise how you could sub in your own preferred players.

2. Targeting a formation

Another key element of planning your starting squad is deciding which base formation you’re aiming for – this will inform the rest of your selections and tell you where you can skimp on spending money and where the cash needs to go.

It’s very hard to argue in favour of anything other than three defenders this season. Frankly, if you were allowed to play two, you probably would – but the FPL wants us to have something vaguely resembling a real team at the end of the day. There are simply too few defenders with really high points-scoring potential – if only Alexander-Arnold and Kieran Tripper made it past 150 points, it would not be a massive shock.

So that leaves us choosing between 3-5-2 and 3-4-3. The latter is tricky because of the relatively low number of high-quality strikers available, especially with Ivan Toney missing the entire first half of the campaign thanks to his ban for gambling infractions. It does become very possible if you believe in some of the cheaper forwards on offer, however – Yoane Wissa, Toney’s centre-forward replacement at Brentford and João Pedro, Brighton’s record signing being fine examples of low-cost strikers who could easily score big points.

The problem is that it’s tough to know exactly who the high-scoring strikers might be – and that makes it hard to argue in favour of 3-4-3 except as a high-risk option. 3-5-2, on the other hand, allow us to start off with a cheap forward while maxing out the points we can earn from a stacked line-up of options in the centre of the park. The bulk of the points are likely to come from midfield this season, and while 3-4-3 might end up being the best set-up, we’d start with a stacked midfield and move around from there. It’s simply the safest set-up.

Another thing to consider is how your team will look each week. We’ve put new Aston Villa signing Moussa Diaby in our templates as a £6.5m midfielder, but if you’d prefer to bench him for gameweek one against Newcastle United, then you need to make sure you’re happy with the defender or forward you’d have coming in for him. If you put together what feels like a well-balanced team but don’t like how it lines up against the fixtures for the first few weeks, then you probably need to change something. Fixture considerations start from week one, something a lot of players seem to forget in trying to find an “optimal” build from the very beginning.

Looking at the first few weeks of the season, we’d say Manchester City, Arsenal, Brentford and Spurs have the softest starts to the season – while Chelsea, Liverpool and Newcastle have a hard road for the first few matches. Lean in the direction of players who have the gentler starts – don’t pick Alexander-Arnold for the sake of it if you doubt Liverpool’s ability to successfully navigate the first month or so of the campaign with multiple clean sheets. You can always transfer players in later on.

A small side note – thanks to construction work at Kenilworth Road, Luton Town and Burnley’s game on the second weekend has been postponed. As both have cheap defensive options many players are considering, be careful that you don’t set yourself up with two only to need one to start come the second gameweek. Not a major pitfall, but a small sand trap to chip into should you be unwary.

That’s all for part one, and hopefully that gives you an idea of how to fix everything up on your first pass – in part two, which you can find here, we’ll run through the ways you can decide how to fill out your team and where to gamble on high-risk players.