Roll your transfers until after the international break

Rolling cheese, rolling people 

Rolling transfers is usually a good thing - especially since the rules tweak a couple of years ago that now allows us to bank up to 5 Free Transfers. Being able to make multiple transfers at a time can be hugely valuable, for the far greater flexibility it gives us to conduct mini-rebuilds of our squads.

Making purely elective transfers - 'chasing points' with impulsive changes when you have a full first eleven of players who are fit, guaranteed to start, and playing decently well - is usually a bad thing.

Making elective transfers is particularly a bad thing this early in the season, when form hasn't settled down yet, and so we really can't often have any sort of confidence about who might be a better pick than the players we have already.

And it's a particularly, particularly bad thing when we're soon likely to have special reasons for possibly needing to make a lot of changes at once. At the moment, we're about to enter an international break; and not just any old international break, but an unprecedented three-week monster of a break!

Now, I tend to think that the risk of incurring lots of injuries in international breaks is greatly overstated. The rate of injuries in international football is much, much lower than in club football (I can't actually remember ever having lost one of my Fantasy players to an international break injury....). However, the risk is there; and it must be heightened by the unusual length and number of matches of the upcoming break. 

But even more concerning is the disruptive effect that this must inevitably have on club training over the next few weeks. Any form we thought we had seen emerging in the opening few games is likely to evaporate: we're basically all starting our FPL season again from scratch on October 10th! (This is why, in an ideal world, you'd save your first Wildcard until at least the end of October.)  Moreover, there are a few potential 'turns' in fixture difficulty around then, which may prompt you to want to make a few changes to your squad as well.

We are all likely to need to use 1 or 2 transfers (maybe more) straight after the international break to replace injuries that emerge over the next three weeks. We are also very likely to want to use quite a few more transfers in the immediately following gameweeks, because of likely swings in form and fixture-difficulty emerging after this disruptive hiatus in the Premier League schedule. Thus, it is essential to have a few transfers in hand after the break. (Playing your Wildcard over the upcoming break would ameliorate this problem, but not erase it completely, because we're also likely to need to make quite a few changes in the following gameweeks as well.) 

And yet, and yet.... the FPL forums are again full of people asking, "What transfer should I make this week?"  Why are you making any??  Why are you even thinking about it??  It makes no sense.