Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 3: Transfer deadline advice before Man Utd take on Liverpool

Welcome back to my weekly Fantasy Premier League advice column – as 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert (which a top finish of #1693 globally), I’m here ahead of every deadline to offer up some hints, tips and captaincy picks to help you pick up points and win those all-important mini-leagues.

This week, I’m going to dive back into transfers and make some suggestions about navigating moves both the real-life deadline day and how to plan ahead for the coming weeks. Should you save up transfers or get spending now? Read on and find out how I’d do it… but before that, just a quick reminder that the deadline for transfers and squad selection this week is 11:00 BST on Saturday 31 August, ahead of the early kick-off between Arsenal and Brighton & Hove Albion.

Don’t panic but do plan ahead

In last week’s column, I outlined the philosophy for when to make early transfers and when to hold and stay patient – and while I won’t go into all that again, I am going to discuss how to handle the end of the transfer window, which could have a huge impact on several players’ values, and there’s a lot of overlap in the basic principles.

Once again, a key tenet is not to panic too quickly about a player’s performances in the first couple of weeks of the season, as that can lead to over-reactions and mistakes and also lead you to sell yourself a dummy when players are bought and sold and the narrative shifts.

To provide a good early example – with Aston Villa full-back Matty Cash getting injured last weekend, there’s been a bit of buzz about £4.0m back-up Kosta Nedeljković, who could well start the next few matches. The things is that there are quite a few rumours circulating that suggest Villa might sign Dutch right-back Lutsharel Geertruida by the end of the deadline, and he could easily make the team over Nedeljković if the deal goes through, killing off any reason to sign the Serbian.

The lesson is partly to keep abreast of rumours when you can but it’s mostly just to wait until Saturday morning, if at all possible, before making decisions. That brilliant plan you put together on Friday morning could easily implode by midnight – take the case of Noni Madueke, who scored a hat-trick last weekend and convinced hundreds of thousands of managers to sign him, but who could also be sold, according to some stories, or find that a player has been signed who reduces his minutes.

The Madueke example is also a potential lesson against knee-jerking too hard, too early. He will inevitably be rotated with Cole Palmer, Pedro Neto and potentially others and is almost certainly not going to play 90 minutes every week early in the season – nor is he going to score three goals from an xG of 0.54 every time. It may actually end up being for the best if he does end up getting sold, even if it isn’t clear how likely that is right now.

Chasing after players who have played well once or twice but who can’t necessarily be counted on to do it week in, week out, is a surefire way to burn transfers. Madueke may well keep his superb form up and become a clear-cut starter in Enzo Maresca’s squad, but as it stands it’s at least as likely that he’ll play some weeks and miss others, score some weeks and do nothing the rest of the time. Overall, it doesn’t look all that likely that he will do what Cole Palmer and Anthony Gordon did last year, although if he starts proving me wrong then I’ll happily eat my words.

Another reason not to rush transfers through too quickly, however, is that you might fail to pre-empt a move which changes things entirely. Maybe the striker you just signed gets stiff competition for his first-team spot by the end of Friday. Perhaps if you sell Ivan Toney after betting on him in week one, he ends up at Chelsea or Manchester United and start banging the goals in.

Nobody can perfectly predict which unfancied players will suddenly rack up huge scores or who will be in or out of first-team plans come the end of Friday night, but it makes sense to wait where possible. Another example – enough people have already sold Jordan Pickford after Everton’s poor start to the season that his price has dropped, but now we have some new goalkeeping options in Aaron Ramsdale (apparently about to be Southampton’s first choice), Sam Johnstone (off to Wolves) and Kepa Arrizabalaga (now at Bournemouth). Two of them are even down at £4.4m, a potential saving.

All three could easily be much better than the player those Pickford sellers signed to replace him already, but now they’re stuck with a potentially inferior alternative because they moved before they had the maximum amount of information. Sometimes incoming price changes force your hand early, but there’s no excuse outside of that for rushing a deal through in midweek, especially on a week when so much can change so quickly.

It's also important to plan ahead. I’ll go into this in more detail in a future column, but there’s a strong case to be made for making sweeping changes around Gameweek 6, when several teams’ fixture difficulty flips the other way. A lot of managers will either use a wildcard or, thanks to the new transfer rules, save up as many transfers as possible to make wholesale changes.

Not every team will need or want to do that and not every team will do it the same way, but plan ahead and see how your team looks by week six and then work backwards to see how you would get it to a place you’re happy with. For instance, Liverpool’s games get harder quite quickly and you may well want to sell a player like Diogo Jota for Jarrod Bowen, perhaps, thanks to West Ham’s games getting easier.

If you don’t plan ahead, you may well end up needlessly using transfers now that you could have used to make a much bigger difference in a month’s time. You could force yourself to either burn a wildcard or stick with an unsatisfactory team because you chased early form players when sticking with what you had would have left you with enough transfers to do what you wanted by the time week six rolls around.

Players who plan ahead for the next few weeks may miss out on a few points in the short term but will often do much better in the long run. Equally, if you plan ahead and determine that you want to wildcard anyway, chasing short-term gains makes far more sense and carries both less risk and more reward. That gamble on Madueke or some shiny new signing makes a lot more sense if you weren’t going to need those transfers anyway – but remember that transfers no longer reset after a wildcard. You can roll them through, so there’s always at least some value in holding until you have more information to work with.

Captaincy calls and selection specifics

Unlike last week, when Erling Haaland made a lot of managers very happy with his hat-trick, there isn’t necessarily a clear-cut captain pick this week – although it’s hard to go too far wrong by just picking the big Norwegian again if he’s in your team. He’s on form and while he probably won’t bang three past West Ham, that doesn’t mean he isn’t likely to do something.

Past that, Ollie Watkins is the gambler’s option given his awful start to the campaign, Bukayo Saka is another safe bet and Mohamed Salah often does at least something against Manchester United. In the spirit of targeting the newly-promoted teams (an increasingly appealing plan these days), Bryan Mbeumo might be a sneaky differential shout as well. I’m steering clear of Newcastle and Spurs players this time around, that fixture is too hard to call.

I’d also suggest this as a decent time to move on any Chelsea players you do like, which I guess means that Madueke might not be such a bad plan after all – but I’d prefer to get Cole Palmer in if I can, and moving on from Saka this weekend or next is a very reasonable plan too as Arsenal have a couple of tough games between now and week six. They’re another team whose difficulty of fixtures ebbs and flows around that same weekend.

Elsewhere, Newcastle’s fixtures are just a little tricky for the next few weeks so don’t be afraid to move on a player like Gordon temporarily if it makes your plans work out better, while Ipswich have some enticing fixtures by new boy standards and if I am ever going to gamble on Sammie Szmodics, it’s now.

In the spirit of patience I’ve not made any changes to my example team yet, which you can see below, but plausible plans include moving from Saka to Palmer by changing Pickford for a £4.4m goalkeeper or Marc Guéhi for Nedeljković (or maybe Gordon for Szmodics, even) – or simply doing nothing. Here’s the team’s points from last week, so you can see where I stand:

As I gradually lean closer to a wildcard in Gameweek 6, I’m slightly regretting the Guéhi inclusion as it doesn’t really fit that plan and I’m certainly annoyed by how poorly Jarell Quansah has worked out so far, but I’m holding my nerve with that one in the hope that he gets back in the team and his value starts going up again before I move him on anyway in a month or so.

Otherwise, that was a very satisfactory week’s work following a slightly disappointing first weekend and hopefully we can keep the pace up with another 80+ point week. I’ll back in a fortnight for Gameweek 4’s column but until then best of luck and may all your transfers pan out perfectly.