Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 10: tips, price rises and captain picks ahead of Man Utd vs. Man City showdown

Fantasy Premier League time is ticking round once more, and with a full slate of games and a Manchester derby to negotiate in Gameweek 10 – and as per usual, 3 Added Minutes is back with some handy hints and transfer tips to keep you at the top of your leagues.

We’ll get to our advice on the captaincy and some notes on price changes later, but first we’re going to mull over some possible bargain buys for your squads. With players falling over themselves to squeeze Mohamed Salah, Son Heung-Min, Kieran Trippier and several other high-scoring players (alongside Erling Haaland, of course), now’s a good time to see which players at the budget-friendly end of the scale could work as the makeweights when you’re working out how to afford all those blue-chip players.

The transfer deadline this week is on Friday at 18:30 BST ahead of Tottenham Hotspur’s trip to Crystal Palace, so be warned that it’s an early one. Don’t dawdle too long before making those all-important changes to your team.

Big points, low money

Let’s run through some of our picks for budget-conscious buys this week, beginning with a few teams who have some promising runs of fixtures on the horizon – Brighton & Hove Albion, Aston Villa and West Ham United, all of whom have some handily-priced players in their ranks.

When it comes to the Seagulls, it’s always tricky – a lot of their cheaper stars like Evan Ferguson, João Pedro and Simon Adingra tend to be heavily rotated, meaning that they simply aren’t reliable sources of points. We do like Adingra a little given that injuries to Solly March and Julio Enciso reduce Roberto di Zerbi’s options, but the only player we’re really interested in is Kaoru Mitoma. The Japanese midfielder tends to swing between huge returns and total misses, so he isn’t someone we’d lean on too heavily, but he’s one of the few rotation-proof players in the team and is probably due a haul or two. Some soft fixtures look like fertile ground for him.

Up in the Midlands, Aston Villa offer a couple of interesting opportunities for cheap mids – Douglas Luiz is on inspired goalscoring form all of a sudden, and it seems to be a case of his being used in more advanced areas rather than a lucky run of form. At £5.5m, he could be a good makeweight, and he’s on penalties as well.

John McGinn is another player at the same price point who could notch up a few points, but we’re definitely more interested in the Brazilian – meanwhile, if you want a relatively cheap defender, Villa are pretty solid at the back and that makes Pau Torres a very reasonable pick-up at £4.5m. Spurs defenders are more in vogue (Micky van de Ven is £4.6m and becoming increasingly popular) but their upcoming games are rather tougher.

West Ham should do OK over the coming month or so despite the thumping they took at Villa Park last weekend – but a handful of players tend to hog the points. James Ward-Prowse hasn’t registered a goal or assist for four matches now, but his set pieces mean that he’s seldom too far from another goal, and at £6.3m he’s certainly worth consideration. If you need a cheap striker, meanwhile, we have Michail Antonio pegged as a sleeper hit, at least for the short term. He’s been out of the goals for a while but still starts every game. Again, probably due a few.

Elsewhere, Wolves have an up-and-down fixture list but Hwang Hee-Chan and Pedro Neto have both been among the goals a lot lately, and both come in temptingly cheap and under the £6.0m mark. The South Korean, in particular, is in incredible form. We’d also recommend Anthony Gordon as another regular goalscorer who won’t break the bank. A couple of midfielders along those price lines make it a heck of a lot easier to get the expensive players in your side.

There really aren’t many great options in defence – Reece James’ return means that Malo Gusto may well find his minutes reduced, while all of the other sub-£4.5m defenders are there for a reason. Kostas Tsimikas, deputising for the injured Andrew Robertson, is by far the best buy for your back line. Otherwise, this probably isn’t the place to skimp. Up front, Yoane Wissa is going well again but Brentford have some horrible fixtures on the horizon, and Dominic Solanke is doing OK if you want to trim the fat from the forwards. Again, though, Bournemouth have a mixed bag of games in their immediate future. Manchester City and Newcastle United both await.

Overall, if you need to find some savings, the midfield is the place to look. A couple of players like Hwang and Luiz make it a lot easier to buy in the premium players you’re missing, without costing too many points. If we had to pick one, Hwang is perhaps our guy unless you can stretch as far as Mitoma.

Injury updates, captaincy calls and price changes

Quite a few players will miss out this week – we’ve already mentioned Brighton’s March but we now know Sven Botman will definitely miss at least one game, while Arsenal’s Gabriel Jesus also has a knock and could easily miss out on the match against Sheffield United. Manuel Akanji is the other player plenty of people have who won’t be involved after he was sent off late on last week.

As for price changes, watch out for Botman and Phil Foden dropping before the weekend – Ederson, Carlton Morris and Jordan Beyer are trending downwards too. Other names to keep a weather eye on are Jack Grealish, Nathan Aké, Cody Gakpo and Jordan Pickford, although they’re all further from a drop than the others.

Rising rapidly is Jamaal Lascelles, who seems like a very short-termist option given that Botman isn’t expected to miss more than two more games, and Anthony Gordon isn’t a million miles from a bump. Otherwise, it’s gone a little quiet in terms of price rises, with the market settling after some mass wildcard action in recent weeks.

As for your captain this week? It’s impossible to look past Salah. He’s on fine form and has a home fixture against Nottingham Forest to look forward to. If you don’t have the Egyptian then the other usual suspects – Son and Haaland – are both perfectly reasonable picks, but Bukayo Saka could be a slightly off-piste selection, given that Arsenal are at home to the Blades this week, and Ollie Watkins is a very solid shout ahead of a match against Luton. We’d say Salah is the first option, then Saka or Watkins, then Haaland and Son.

3 Added Minutes FC

Before we wrap up, let’s take a quick look at our example team, which enjoyed a lovely little 94-point week and is now back up into the global top 20,000 – putting us well inside the top 0.002% of players. Handy.

We’ve got some changes to make this week, and we’ll start by nudging Botman out for Tsimikas – which happily frees up enough cash to move Foden out for Saka, assuming we get word that he’s fully fit to play at the weekend. Foden’s impending price drop won’t cost us anything as we had him at starting price and he’s only risen £0.1m, so we can afford to hang fire until the pre-match press-conferences. Looking further forward, we’re getting tired of waiting for Joško Gvardiol to start hauling and Wissa is looking a little suspect too, but aside from that our side is in a very good place indeed.

That’s all for this week – join us again next week for more handy FPL advice. In the meantime, may all of your cheap squad-fillers rack up some serious points for you in the coming weeks.