Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 14: tips, captain picks and wildcard planning as Newcastle host Man Utd

Welcome back to our weekly strategy guide for the Fantasy Premier League in which we offer up hints, transfer tips and captaincy picks for the week ahead – and with our team, 3 Added Minutes FC, now sailing into the global top 2,000, you know you’re in pretty safe hands when you take our advice.

This week we’re going to discuss how players who’ve carefully saved up their wildcards can make the most of it before it disappears at the end of December, offer up some ideas for players to sign and sell, and run through the latest news on injuries, suspensions and price changes. But before we get into all that, remember we have a late deadline this week, and you’ll not need to have your team ready before 13:30 BST on Saturday with no early kick-off in the Premier League. A luxury for the less active among us…

Playing your wildcards right

For those unaware, FPL players get two wildcards per season, but the first is only available until 11:00 BST on 30 December. If you haven’t burned it up by that point, you lose it forever – so when the second one arrives at the start of January, you can’t have two at the same time.

A lot of people will have used theirs already as they worked to correct course from perceived mistakes in their week one teams, and there was a huge flurry in transfer activity back in October which felt an awful lot like millions of wildcards being used inside the same week or two – but plenty of people, ourselves includes, still have theirs ready to go and need to work out how to get the most out of it.

It’s important to remember that we will want to save our second wildcard for the middle of the second half of next season, when double gameweeks will start popping up and big swings will be available – and that means we need to wildcard into strong, long-term teams. The question is – when do we pull the trigger?

There’s obviously some justification for waiting until the very last moment, because that reduces the chances that we wildcard into a team that immediately gets struck by a string of injuries, for instance, but another good idea is to look for a ‘break point’ in the fixture list where a number of teams’ fixture difficulty changes for the coming weeks at around the same time – using it then allows us to put together a sensible team while avoiding hanging onto players who have some hard games in their immediate future. And we think we’ve found just such a break point – Gameweek 17.

Several teams with large numbers of good FPL assets see their fixture difficulty shift around that time. Arsenal’s games get tougher from Gameweek 16 when they travel to Aston Villa, and Villa’s own games soften considerably the week after that. Chelsea get a nice run of fixtures from week 16 onwards, while Liverpool’s get much tougher from week 17 when they host Manchester United – although on current form that particular fixture may not look too scary in its own right.

Gameweek 17 also sees Spurs emerge from a tricky run with three games in four against bottom-half teams and Newcastle United drop into a run of Fulham, Luton Town and Nottingham Forest. In other words, there are a lot of players who suddenly get considerably more or less valuable between weeks 16 and 17 – so that could be a great time to make wholesale changes to your squad.

It’s also worth noting that Manchester City and Brentford have blank gameweeks in week 18, so again going for a wildcard on Gameweek 17 means you can move Bryan Mbeumo and the like on. Of course, you still need to keep the big names around – we don’t recommend dropping Erling Haaland even if he will miss a game, for instance, and Liverpool’s tricky run doesn’t justify switching out Mohamed Salah, but for players like Julian Álvarez and Darwin Nuñéz it’s a great time to get them out of the side.

So if you do decide to go for it around Gameweek 17, what should you do in the meantime? Well, first of all, you have the license to drop otherwise good players without worrying about bringing them back in, so if you want to ditch Ollie Watkins for a couple of weeks after the impending Bournemouth match, for instance, that’s fine – he can come back in a few weeks.

But do remember that if you sell players and want them back later, you’ll need to pay full whack on any players who price has risen – selling and re-purchasing Matty Cash, for instance, would be a dead loss for most players who’ve had him a little while. So we recommend planning ahead by working out your ideal post-wildcard team, checking the numbers on any sales you make in the meantime, and deciding whether to make those changes based on whether you can get back to where you’ll want to be. Dropping Cash is fine if you can afford to bring him back – but keep him if you can’t. Remember too that after a wildcard your free transfers reset to one regardless of how many you had beforehand – so plan to use them all up!

As for players without wildcards to work out, you should still be aware of those shifts in fixture difficulty – doubling up on Arsenal defenders, for instance, looks appealing in the short term but might come back to bite you, while selling Villa players ahead of their games against Manchester City and Arsenal looks less appealing. We do, however, really like moving Watkins on for Alexander Isak, if you have him – Isak is back and scoring freely again, and his numbers for this season are hugely impressive. There’s a great path to profit right there, and Isak looks like a player who's stock will rise quickly. We like him a lot on current form.

Injuries, suspensions and price changes

Before we go through likely impending price changes, a quick note – transfer movement happened very late last week after the international break, which meant that while we only predicted a small handful of price rises, there ended up being a bunch. So take these with a slight pinch of salt, and keep an eye on popular players who don’t immediately seem likely to rise – players have been waiting longer and that means more unexpected changes at the last moment.

With that being said, Salah is due for another jump to £13.1m, while Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Kostas Tsimikas are trending upwards as well. Jérémy Doku isn’t too close to a price rise as we write on Thursday, but he isn’t unlikely to spike by the time the weekend rolls around. Moving in the other direction are the aforementioned Cash and Álvarez – so shift them soon if you plan to drop them – and Cody Gakpo isn’t far from dropping either.

As for injuries, there’s still a great chance that Kaoru Mitoma and Jarrod Bowen remain unavailable for another week, although the managers’ press conferences will tell us more – and Pervis Estupiñán, having appeared to be close to a return, now looks likely to be out for a while longer. Alisson and Eberchi Eze are also injured and the Brazilian goalkeeper, in particular, seems certain to miss a match or two.

There are also quite a few players who are one booking away from a one-game suspension, so be aware of that with Bruno Fernandes, Jarrad Branthwaite, Lucas Digne, Jack Grealish, Rodri, Kai Havertz, Issa Kaboré, Douglas Luiz, Raheem Sterling, Kieran Trippier, Cash and several more. Try to avoid having too many of those players on your team at the same time, or you could get backed into a corner.

As for your captain this week – it’s very hard to look beyond Salah, who will face Fulham at Anfield. We don’t blame anyone for taking Haaland but when given the choice between the two, always go for the midfielder because of the extra points potential on goals and clean sheets. If you don’t have Salah then Haaland, Saka and Watkins look like your next best bets.

3 Added Minutes FC

As usual, let’s end with a quick update on our example team and a bit of mild boasting as we soar inside the top 1,500 in the world thanks to our willingness to follow our own advice – which raked us in 63 points this time around. We probably won’t be making any changes this week after bringing William Saliba in last time around, and we’ll certainly be skippering Salah.

That’s all for this week – may all your wildcards be perfectly timed and may all the players you buy avoid sudden injuries the second they’re in your team. Good luck!