How did the Free Hit work out this weekend??

I've seen various figures online suggesting that between 1 and 1.5 million FPL managers might have played their first Triple Captain chip on Erling Haaland in this Gameweek 13 just past (although I don't think FPL has released an official total yet; these are all probably just estimates; I'm rather surprised that the number isn't much higher). But a very significant number of people - probably some hundreds of thousands at the very least - opted to play their Free Hit chip instead.

Did that work out for them??

Well, of course, your mileage will vary....

But on the whole, I'd venture.... NO.

Many GW13 Free Hitters online are just comparing themselves to the disastrous Haaland Triple Captain play. Of course, anything was better than that.

But that's not how these things work. You have to compare like with like (Triple Captain option against Triple captain option, Free Hit against Free Hit): how did the GW13 Haaland Triple Captain play work out compared to other gameweeks in which you might have used (or could still use) the chip on him, or on another high-scoring player; and how well did the Free Hit work out this weekend - in terms of the points-lift it gave you over the team you had anyway - in comparison to other gameweeks in which you might play it?

Quite a few people who did well from their Free Hit this gameweek have posted scores up in the mid-60s and low 70s, which is pretty good for this (very low-scoring) week. But as I scan around my leagues, I don't find the upper reaches of this week's ranking dominated by Free Hitters. A lot of people got scores in the 70s with their regular team. (And a lot of people don't even bother to do this elementary calculation. If their Free Hit team returned a pretty respectable points total, they feel satisfied with that; and they don't go to the trouble of working out what their regular team would have got - much less factoring in the possible impact of one or two regular transfers to improve that regular team for this set of fixtures. If your Free Hit squad didn't actually give you any more points than your unchanged squad might have done, then it was a bust!)

In order to get good returns from the Free Hit (or Bench Boost) chip - at least in general terms, for the majority of people playing it in a particular gameweek, rather than for just a few execeptionally lucky managers - you need plenty of high-scoring players and plenty of good player returns and match results that were fairly readily predictable. 

And, unfortunately, this gameweek just didn't turn out like that: a lot of matches followed an unexpected course. Brentford eventually got an anticipated 'big win' against Burnley, but really had to struggle for it, and all the goals only came very late in the game; City nearly lost to Leeds, Bournemouth did lose to Sunderland, and Spurs and Palace both lost at home to less formidable opponents, while Villa and Liverpool were lucky to beat their bottom-of-the-table opponents at all, and didn't rack up the margin of victory expected. Even Newcastle weren't predicted to get a win away from home, let alone a big win, against the usually defensively strong Everton. And almost no-one managed to keep a clean sheet.

So, most teams didn't get the sort of results that were generally expected, and few players returned particularly good hauls. In fact, of the most fancied players - both among existing selections and among those transferred in on a Free Hit - almost no-one produced a good return this week; most of them blanked. Only a few members of the 'Team of the Week' have any significant ownership, and probably weren't any more popular in Free Hit selections than they are in existing squads (while the best of this week's forwards, Igor Thiago, was in a lot of squads already, without a Free Hit).

So, unfortunately, this turned out not to be a great week for the Free Hit - because it wasn't easy to anticipate who would bring in good points, not very many players did bring in really good points; and there wasn't any major difference in points returns between 'Free Hit players' and 'regular team players' in this frustrating gameweek with such exceedingly low average scores.

That does not mean it was a bad week in which to choose to play the Free Hit. The combination of fixtures did look promising for it. But the eccentric and unexpected game outcomes and the low points returns from most of the more fancied players meant that it ended up being a bad week to have played it in - for most people. (But it might still prove to be better than nothing; it might yet end up having been the least worst option in a bunch of gameweeks that will all disappoint in various ways!)

There were, however, (as there usually are!) a few player choices that worked out pretty well - if you didn't have them already, but brought them in on a Free Hit. It's the managers who lucked into these picks who enjoyed the 70+ points returns on their Free Hit play this week. 

Liverpool, Villa, and Brighton were the only teams to keep clean sheets (rather unexpectedly, and in the case of the first two, really rather luckily), so taking a keeper or defenders from any of those three teams worked out well. Aston Villa seemed to be a particularly popular choice among the Free Hitters; although Rogers and Malen didn't work out for them, while Martinez and Cash did.

Cody Gakpo and Phil Foden were also strangely popular Free Hit choices - despite having shown few indications of likely FPL points-scoring in recent games; Foden, in particular, often now being played in a slightly deeper role, had recorded a long string of blanks and often been fairly anonymous in City's games in the past couple of months. But they both came up with goals - goals their sides scarcely deserved on the balance of play, goals in added-on time. That's LUCK right there! There was no compelling rationale for including either of those two players in a Free Hit selection. Honestly, they looked obviously rather less tempting picks than teammates of theirs in the most impressive form recently - Doku, Cherki, Szoboszlai. Brentford's Dango Ouattara was also up there among the week's most successful Free Hit picks; but there was a stronger rationale for fancying him against a defensively frail team like Burnley, especially given Brentford's strong recent home form - although, again, Schade or Damsgaard might have seemed the more promising midfield options from that club (and many FPL managers will have had one of those three already).

So, people who'd gone for Villa (or Liverpool or Brighton) defensive assets and Foden and/or Gakpo and/or Ouattara with their Free Hit changes did pretty nicely for themselves with the chip in Gameweek 13. But they were a fairly small minority. And even they didn't do conspicuously any better than a large number of good non-Free Hitters.

On balance, a Free Hit play this weekend certainly wasn't the abject disaster that the Haaland Triple Captaincy was, but.... that's damning with faint praise. It really didn't work out at all well either.