The Chelsea treble-up??

 

I am very wary about trebling up on one club at any time, for any reason - but especially early in the season (when we really don't know how anyone's form is settling down yet).

And I would almost always avoid even doubling up on one club in the same area of the pitch; trebling up in the same area always seems simply crazy to me.

At the back, where you're generally only starting three defenders anyway, if you take all, or almost all of that regular starting three from one club - you leave yourself screwed if that club has a fixture postponed for any reason (foul weather, food poisoning outbreak, faulty floodlights, bomb scare, or reaching the League Cup Final....), as well as whenever they're facing a really tough opponent where you can't fancy their chances of getting a clean sheet too highly,... and in those unfortunate occasional games where they somehow just don't 'show up', or suffer some bad breaks (an early penalty conceded or an early sending-off can scupper even the strongest team's chances in a match). It's tempting to go in heavy for the defence of an exceptional team like Arsenal who are keeping clean sheets every other week; but even Arsenal, in their extraordinary season last year, failed to keep clean sheets in half their games - while many other teams did. Last year, there was a case for taking 2 from the back at Arsenal (2 defenders, or a defender and Raya), especially in the latter part of the season when they rallied from a slight 'wobble' to grind out an extraordinary succession of back-to-back clean sheets. But going for 3 would not have brought any additional value; it would have limited your rotation options too much (as well as leaving you without any room to bring in any more advanced players from the club).

In attack, few teams ever manage to be sufficiently prolific, or to share their attacking contributions around evenly enough, to make it worth getting 3 players from them. There is essentially a finite pool of attacking points which is shared between the goalscoring midfielders and forwards; and if 1 or 2 of them have a really good week, usually none of the others will. 

Plus, of course, the same points apply as above for the defence: you're leaving yourself vulnerable to catastrophic disruption from (possibly unexpected) blank gameweeks, and you're denying yourself the opportunity to take a defender or keeper from that club.  So, it's generally not even worth thinking about to treble up on one club in attack.

However,.... might the current Chelsea case be an exception??

They are currently looking so prolific in attack that the pool of points they generate in most weeks could be very large. Thus far, these attacking points are being shared almost exclusively between Joao Pedro, Rogers, and Palmer; and they are being shared fairly evenly and consistently between the three of them (Joao Pedro: 3 goals, 3 assists; Morgan Rogers: 3 goals, 1 assist; Cole Palmer: 2 goals, 2 assists).

And at the moment, the Chelsea defence is dreadful, conceding almost as many goals as their rampant attack is scoring; so, no-one wants their keeper or any of their defenders.

So, my two usual key arguments against such a treble-up might not apply here. And the misgiving about the possible impact of 'off days' or Acts of God might be exaggerated: we do sometimes see teams going for long spells - occasionally, perhaps, even a whole season - without suffering any such misfortunes.

However, I think there's still a problem of opportunity cost in putting all your eggs in one basket like this. Sure, Joao Pedro is on fire at the moment, and is looking as if he might possibly be able to challenge Haaland for the Golden Boot. But Palmer and Rogers are not currently in the Top 5 midfielders; there are other choices, possibly better choices out there. And if Chelsea were to suffer a sudden downturn in form - or just hit a little cluster of tougher fixtures - it's more awkward to ditch 2 or 3 players in a hurry, rather than just a single one. This is why you avoid double-ups and treble-ups: it doesn't spread risk - it makes things unduly difficult for you when you want to pivot away from that club, short- or long-term. You're almost always much better off spreading your midfield and forward selections across as many different clubs as possible.

Moreover, these are expensive picks: Palmer, despite a season ruined by injuries last year, was the most expensive midfielder after Bruno Fernandes - at 9.5 million; Joao Pedro and Morgan Rogers were both 7.5 million, and are rapidly climbing towards 8.0 (and although that price-point isn't usually quite 'premium', this year, when there are fairly few players placed in the upper price-brackets, it feels like it: for that 17 million that Palmer and Rogers originally cost, you could afford, for example, Bruno Fernandes and Pascal Gross,.... or three high-performing 'budget' picks!!).

My feeling is that, however well Palmer and Rogers are currently doing, there are still other midfield options who are doing about as well or a little better; and the benefits of spreading risk outweigh a slight short-term deficit anyway (go for Mbeumo or Gakpo or Cherki or Gibbs-White or Odegaard or Tavernier or Hinshelwood or Gross, etc., etc. - they'll surely work out in the longer-term, even if they don't quite over a short run of games). Personally, I would probably only go for Palmer or Rogers if I didn't have Joao Pedro up front. Saka is looking at least as promising as Palmer at the top of the price spectrum; and there are several rival options at or below Rogers's price-point. And if you do believe that Chelsea's attack are going to continue to massively out-perform any other team's, against all opposition, and you want further representation from them in addition to JP, then.... pick one of them, don't plunge in for both.

So, yes, I see the temptation of the treble Chelsea attack. But I am not finding it hard to resist it.

The Great FPL Paradox: the 'best player' is not always the 'best pick'

 

This is perhaps the hardest idea for most Fantasy Football managers to wrap their heads around. 

It seems obvious, surely, that the best players are going to produce the most points; and the players who produce the most points are the ones you want - right??

Well, NO - not necessarily.

1)  The objectively 'best' all-around players may not always have their excellence fully reflected in their Fantasy points returns.

This has generally been particularly true of defenders and defensive midfielders; and that under-rewarding in the FPL points system has only been slightly ameliorated by the introduction of new points for 'defensive contributions' (the number of points available is quite small, the threshold for earning them is too high, and the tallying of the eligible contributions is too obscure and unreliable for them to have all that much impact, or to improve the overall 'fairness' of the scoring system in the game). But it's also true of more creative midfielders who may be great playmakers, but don't produce all that many attacking contributions (the only things that get any direct recognition in the game; pre-assists and pre-pre-assists are often far more skillful and more valuable than the final credited 'assist', but gain no merit). There are some very, very good players who just aren't really worth considering for an FPL squad. If you allow yourself to be swayed by your appreciation of football, by your recognition of a player's talents - rather than his points potential - you will make some misguided selections.

2)  The players who got the most FPL points last year will not necessarily produce the same returns this year.

Ah, people may object, but we're not interested in the unregarded midfield dynamos or tough-as-nails central defenders who hold their teams together without often earning many Fantasy points; we just look at last year's points tallies and pick the guys with the biggest numbers. But, unfortunately, that tends to be a flawed approach too. There can be all sorts of reasons - known (change of club, change of manager, change of tactics, change of surrounding personnel, improvements by key rivals, injury, aging...) or unknown (the 'headspace', form suddenly falls off a cliff for no obvious reason...) - why a player's performance in one season can be much better or worse than it was the season before. Last year's data is a very useful guideline - but it's not definitive or infallible.

3)  And this is the kicker: the players who will get the most points this year... are still not invariably the 'best picks' for the game.

Naive FPL managers often imagine that if they had a time-machine that would allow them to view the year-end player points totals at the start of the season, they could just pick that 'perfect squad' of all the highest points-scorers, and they'd win the global title. But they wouldn't; they probably wouldn't even come all that close. To attain the topmost reaches of the global rankings, you really have to milk more points from every slot in your starting eleven than almost any individual player will earn in the season.

Many of the highest points-scorers, alas, are very patchy, very streaky in their returns: they'll have a few spells of super-hot form but long runs of blanks in between. And it's simply not worth hanging on to those players for extended periods, hoping to catch one of their hot spells - when you could have tried out three or four other players in the meantime, none of whom would have done any worse during the blanking period, and at least one or two of whom (if you correctly recognised when they were coming into good form) could have done substantially better.

Season totals don't necessarily matter: you have to try to maximise your returns for each starting slot by frequently rotating through the players in the hottest form. A player who returns very high season totals and is very consistent in their returns across the season may be worth regarding as a long-term hold; but they are very, very rare (in fact, even Salah or Haaland in their best seasons were not usually worth hanging on to for the entire season).

Moreover, you have to make your picks in the context of the overall selection landscape: you have to weigh up each squad choice in terms of its likely differential advantage over an alternate selection - i.e., how much of a points-lift can you get from this player compared to the next best candidate in his position, or another candidate at a similar price-point across all the positions, or to the other players you might choose from his club?

David Raya is now pretty unarguably the best goalkeeper in the Premier League. But he isn't the best pick for FPL, because he probably won't do that much better than the next best, he's too expensive this year, and you can usually wring more points from a good rotation pair than a single goalkeeper pick (and there are other possible picks from Arsenal that will probably give you more of a points-advantage than him).

Similarly with Gabriel: he is an absolutely awesome defender, probably the best in the league. But for FPL... he's again too expensive this year, and not likely to outscore his cheaper Arsenal teammates this time (his attacking returns will probably be much lower this year; and Calafiori, in particular, offers much more attacking threat, and seems to have a more secure start this year; I'd bet that Timber will too, once he's fit again).

And so too with Bruno Fernandes: he's looking in fabulous form again, he is probably the best all-around midfielder in the league at the moment - and he might well again be the highest-scoring FPL midfielder for the season. But when he's priced at 12 million pounds, the 'opportunity cost' of all the other players you have to do without in order to afford him is probably too much.

The same argument can be made about Erling Haaland; but, although his price-tag is enormous, I feel that his unique differential advantage might yet justify it. He does seem likely to massively outscore any other forward, and if things really go well for him, he might be the one current player with the potential for a 300-point season. However, if it appears that Alex Isak or Joao Pedro could run him close for points returns in the forward category, then he too might become expendable.

NB: All of these players I just name-checked are likely to be the highest points-scorers in their position categories in FPL this year; that doesn't matter. What matters is their relative value to your squad in terms of their advantage over their next-best alternatives, and how much benefit you could reap from spending their fees across the rest of your squad instead.

When to play the Free Hit?

 

This topic comes to prominence this week because so many FPL managers somehow thought that last week - Gameweek 3 - was not merely a suitable, but a necessary, inevitable occasion for them to use the chip; and many more, it seems, are now succumbing to the same folly in Gameweek 4.

I covered the factors affecting the Free Hit decision in full detail last year, but... here's a quick recap.

For the second half of the season, you have to hang on to the Free Hit in the expectation that you will need it to dig you out of a hole in one of the blank gameweeks caused by the League Cup Final, and the FA Cup Semi-Finals and Final. And if, by some happy chance, you find you don't need it for that (occasionally it happens that few of the big teams are affected by the fixture clashes with these Cup games, and you might be able to dance around the inconvenience with some saved-up Free Transfers), it's quite fun to deploy it as a late-season 'smart-bomb' to help you through one of the final rounds of a mini-league cup competition.

For the first-half of the season, though, you have two choices: a) save it for a possible emergency; or b) use it opportunistically to potentially boost your points returns in a gameweek with an unusual set of fixtures.

a)  Emergencies

It is possible to be hit with multiple short-term injuries (and suspensions) all at once, particularly when fatigue and miserable weather combine with the absurd fixture congestion at the end of the year. You don't want to be wasting transfers moving short-term absentees out of your squad and back in again; and if there's a chance that most of them might only miss a single gameweek, it's nice to be able to use your Free Hit to see you through that short-term crisis - until you find out if you might have to spend some 'hits' on any remaining problems the following week. There is also a small - but non-negligible - risk of late postponements for freak reasons such as foul weather or terrorism or pandemic, which can also leave you wanting to make multiple changes for one week only. I think there's usually so little reliable value in using the Free Hit as a 'bonus chip' that you should certainly consider saving it until the latter part of December, to guard against such a possibility of unforeseen calamity.

b)  Opportunistic points boost

You can try this when most of your usual squad players are facing particularly challenging fixtures and/or most of the gameweek's apparently 'easy' fixtures are for teams you don't have much representation from (these two circumstances frequently coincide, but not invariably so; your regular players in an averagely-difficult fixture will probably outperform players from lesser teams even with a very easy fixture; so, you don't really want to consider this option for the chip unless both circumstances apply).

Having a single match in the gameweek where a lot of your players are involved on opposing sides doesn't really meet that threshold - even if, as in the recent Gameweek 3, it was two of the top teams, and many people may have had 5 or 6 players from them. There will almost certainly be some gameweeks over the next few months where there are two or three matches involving the top teams playing against each other.... and more promising fixtures for many of the lesser sides you don't usually have many - or any - players from (that really wasn't the case last weekend; and, as I've said recently about playing an early Bench Boost, there's no sense in playing any of the chips early in the season - because form hasn't settled down yet, performances are erratic, results are unpredictable; you just don't know who to pick, or what kind of returns you can expect.... until well into the second month of the season, usually).

You should, however, be able to tolerate having your players in 'non-ideal' fixtures occasionally (the best players can give you good returns against anyone; you might be pleasantly surprised). You should also have a strong enough bench that moving 2 or 3 or 4 players out of the starting lineup for a gameweek because they face a particularly daunting fixture should not be a problem. And if a fixture, or set of fixtures, looks likely to cause you more inconvenience than that, you should be able to plan ahead and save up Free Transfers, so that you can move the necessary players out of your squad short-term (it's a lot easier to carry out fairly major squad reshuffles since the rules were revised to allow us bank up 5 Free Transfers).

So, the threshold for wanting/needing to use a Free Hit to navigate an unusual set of fixtures should be set pretty high (as with a Wildcard!); unless there are at least 7 or 8 players you want to change, you should try to find another way of dealing with the situation.

Does it matter if I have players playing against each other?

NO.

Come on, be serious. You're going to have some of your Fantasy players facing each other in the same fixture almost every single gameweek.

It might be slightly non-ideal - but it's one of those things that you've just got to suck up.

Good attacking players can get a return against anyone, so you shouldn't fret too much if they're up against a good defence. And both sides in a game can get good attacking returns. So, having attacking players facing each other really shouldn't be any sort of problem at all. 

If you have an attacking player facing a defending player, that looks like a zero-sum situation, because a good return for the attacker is going to diminish the return from the defender. But even that's not the end of the world. You can't ever rely on clean sheets. However, even without a clean sheet, goalkeepers can still give you additional points for their saves; and now defenders can also earn extra points for 'defensive contributions'; and they might even pick up some bonus points too! The key thing with defensive players is that you don't want them to be likely to concede multiple goals, where they might end up returning nul points; conceding a goal or two is a regular occurrence, not at all an FPL disaster. And having a defending player facing an attacking player is at least a hedge: you can console yourself that at least one of them should have a good chance of a decent haul - in a match where the outcome is difficult to call. Also, we tend to pick defenders who have a high potential for providing attacking returns as well...

Now, it's certainly not ideal to have your defenders, especially your goalkeeper, facing Haaland, or one of the other most in-form strikers of the moment. But that's why you should have decent alternates on your bench, so you can take players out of that firing-line. With goalkeepers in particular, a good rotation pair - where you can avoid ever having to put one of them into action against the toughest opponents - can earn you more points than the top individual keeper picks like Raya and Pickford.

And yet... an awful lot of FPL managers were panicking last week about having 3 Chelsea players facing 3 Arsenal players, and thought that was sufficient excuse to be playing their Free Hit. Ridiculous!

First, this is a key reason why you should resist getting trebled up on anyone early in the season. In my initial squad, I was only even doubled up on Brentford, Leeds, and Man Utd. Going for three players from the same club this early is just asking for trouble. Doing it for two clubs - who face each other in Gameweek 3 - is a very avoidable foot-shooting.

Second, you ought to be able to park most of these players on your bench, if you really don't fancy their prospects against a tough opponent (that's what your bench is for!).

Third, these aren't the only 'elite' teams. You're going to have players from City, United, Liverpool as well; and Brentford and Bournemouth are looking very good at the moment too. You're likely to have some of your key players facing each other several times in each half of the season. And in some gameweeks, you're going to have more than one such clashing fixture.

Fourth, while you might not have fancied Arsenal for another clean sheet against what has been a very incisive Chelsea attack in the opening couple of games, you should fancy them to score fairly readily themselves - against the rather porous Chelsea defence. And the Arsenal full-backs, Calafiori and White, have looked a particularly potent attacking threat so far. If you had either or both of them in your squad, you should have fancied their chances of picking up a goal or an assist in that game, even if they didn't produce any defensive points. (And Calafiori was unlucky not to - sticking the ball in the net, but getting it chalked off for an offence by one of his teammates.)

So, having players from both Arsenal and Chelsea should really not have been a problem. And if you felt that it was, it was a 'problem' that could easily have been avoided with a little forethought. There will be other more needful occasions for using the Free Hit chip.

Why that Bench Boost didn't go so well

That glass isn't even half full, not anywhere near 

Apparently, over 800,000 FPL managers risked their Bench Boost on the opening weekend of the season. Most of them were probably duped into it by the surprisingly large number of influential online 'content creators' who (perhaps 'influencing' each other??!!) all suddenly decided - on very spurious grounds - that it might be 'a good idea'.

Here are the reasons usually given for this bizarre choice; and the reasons why they're all completely bogus.

1)  It can give you an early lead.

Yes, it can. It probably did, for many people. But a very small early lead that will rapidly evaporate as other managers play their Bench Boost more sensibly later in the season and get better returns from it. 

To optimise your points returns over the season, you have to try to optimise your returns for every individual gameweek; and playing a chip just to get an early lead does not do that.  If you 'chase the lead' like this, you end up in a worse position overall at the end of the season.

2)  You can set up 'perfectly' for your Bench Boost attempt using the unlimited transfers available in pre-season.

Yes, you can in theory. But as I explained the other day, there are so many uncertainties at the start of the season around form, fitness, tactics, and selection that you really have no idea how well anyone's going to play, or even if they're going to play (you don't always have 15 starters in Gameweek 1; heck, you don't always have as many as 13!!). You're betting completely blind. 

You will almost certainly get a better return from this chip if you play it later in the season (even if you're not able to set up 'perfectly' for it!) - when form has settled down, and you can feel more confident about what the most promising sets of fixtures will be;... and more confident about actually having a full 15 starters.

3)  The fixtures looked really 'promising' this weekend.

You imagined they might be promising. No-one had any real idea which fixtures were going to be easy, and which not. There are almost always a lot of surprises and upsets in the opening gameweek.  

This year.... Manchester United were comprehensively outplayed by promoted Hull; Liverpool were outplayed by unfancied Newcastle, and only salvaged a point with a contentious penalty in the last kick of the match; and Manchester City were outplayed at home by Bournemouth, and barely scraped a late, narrow win; Villa got absolutely thrashed by Brighton; Spurs got absolutely thrashed by Brentford; Sunderland unexpectedly lost to promoted Ipswich; Forest lost at home to Leeds (that was always going to be a tight one; but a lot of people fancied the strong home advantage at the City Ground, and the 'magic touch' of Oliver Glasner); and Chelsea were nearly held to a draw at Fulham thanks to some horrible goalkeeping by Robert Sanchez. So, almost none of those supposedly 'easy' fixtures worked out at all as expected. Amongst the Top 50-odd FPL picks in the first gameweek, the only big returners were most of the Arsenal starters, Palmer, Joao Pedro, and Rogers from Chelsea, and Ndiaye from Everton. 23 of them blanked; another 10 didn't even play (not good for a Bench Boost!); and Matty Cash ended up with -1!! Nearly two-thirds of the most popular players came up with nothing this weekend; and that should not have been a surprise - it often happens. Gameweek 1 is always very unpredictable, and often very low-scoring.

4)  If you went without one or more of the 'super-premium' players, you could afford a 'stacked' bench (and then use an early Wildcard to switch to a much cheaper bench, and maybe bring the omitted big names back in fairly soon).

That one is actually somewhat tempting - apart from the aforementioned problem of not having any idea how most of the opening matches are going to turn out!! But I haven't seen many people following this tactic; almost everyone seems to have been hanging on to at least one of the super-premiums, and a very large number have insisted on having all three (and many of these followed the sheep to Bench Boost anyway, despite, in many cases, having 1 or 2 obvious non-starters on their bench).

The further problems here - in addition to having no real idea who to put on your bench, even if you are able to set aside more money for them - are, first, that it's always a huge risk to go without the big-name players: they're 'big names' for a reason - they often produce massive hauls,... and they often start out the season very hot; Haaland particularly so. (Some years ago, I took a chance on going without the two biggest players that season in my initial squad, and they both scored hattricks on opening day!)  Second, there is a 'cost' to the early use of chips: not only will you almost certainly be able to earn more proints from a later Bench Boost, but hanging on to your Wildcard until later in the season (when you might hit a major injury crisis, or find that there's a big shift in fixture-difficulty for several teams, or a sudden swing in form for some teams) can also be very valuable. Committing to using both of these enormously powerful chips early in the season - when you don't really know what's going on with anyone's form - is.... just silly.

5)  Well, at least this gets the chip 'out of the way'!

Um, what??? No, I can hardly believe I've seen that view expressed by normally sane and sensible members of the online community, but... Believe it or not, this has been quite a commonly expressed sentiment about the early - very early - use of the Bench Boost. Because having a second Bench Boost and Triple Captain to use in the first half of the season is a new feature of the game, only introduced at the start of the 25-26 season, many people are still confused, flummoxed, discombobulated by the fact. They don't see any real value in these additional chips, and are thus inclined to use them any old how, as if it really doesn't matter. And many of them seem genuinely worried that they might just 'forget about them', and then find themselves having to use a handful of chips one after another in December (there will be 6 or 7 gameweeks in December, so.... still not a problem).

This attitude, of course, is utterly fatuous. These chips are valuable, and you should make a careful decision about when you can use them that will give you the strongest possible chance of extracting good value from them. That is emphatically not in Gameweek 1.

Two factors are crucial to a successful Bench Boost, one 'internal' and one 'external'. The 'internal' one is that you need to have a strong squad who are all fit and starting regularly. The 'external' one is that you'd like to have all 15 squad members - or as many of them as possible, at any rate - facing weak opponents in the same gameweek.

In Gameweek 1, you simply cannot be confident that all 15 of your squad members are going to start, nor do you really know which the softest fixtures are likely to be.

The 'global average' score is a powerful indicator of how worthwhile a particular gameweek has been for using the Bench Boost in. A high average indicates that lots of players produced big hauls, and that obviously increases the chances that you might have had many big hauls among your 15 squad members. The 'global average' in this year's Gameweek 1 was a dismally low 48 points; therefore, it was a very poor week to have Bench Boost-ed in.

Now, a lot of people are claiming they did really well on their Bench Boost last week. But did they really??

Players like Sangaré, Kayode, Lewis-Potter and Janelt of Brentford, Hinshelwood and De Cuyper of Brighton, Stach and Bijol and Justin of Leeds, Dewsbury-Hall and Ndiaye of Everton, and Tzolakis of Hull did very well,... and are the type of the players that people might have left on their bench. But these players are all pretty low-owned, so it's unlikely that many people had more than one of them, and many will have had none at all. And it was entirely fortuitous that so many 'fringe' players like this happened to get really big scores in a week in which fairly few players actually returned well. 

Moreover, in most of the cases I've looked at where people have proudly shared their teams, it's pretty obvious that one of these guys should in fact have been starting. And anyway, I always maintain that, since the Bench Boost is a whole-squad achievement, you really ought only to count the 4 lowest-returning players as the true value of your points-lift from the chip, whether you'd left them on the bench or not. After all, if a player doesn't play at all, he gets shifted on to your bench; I think you ought to do the same if a player has a shit game - when evaluating your Bench Boost. Most of the Bench Boosters this week probably heavily backed Manchester United (no-one returned) and Liverpool (Van Dijk and Wirtz, two of the most popular picks, didn't return) and City (Haaland and O'Reilly, the two most popular, didn't return) - and so had a pretty dismal week in their first eleven. Getting a good bench score but a terrible score in your starting eleven.... means you made some bad choices about who to leave on your bench; and it was not ultimately a good return from your Bench Boost. 

You really need to check how high above the global average you were to assess how well your Bench Boost did. I reckon, if you're not at least 20 points above, you did quite poorly (because you'd hope to get at least 10 points above global average most weeks anyway, if you're any good at the game; and 10 points is the absolute minimum you should be making from the Bench Boost, properly counted).

Some people will undoubtedly have done quite well out of it (some people will get lucky with any Bench Boost selection in any Gameweek!!). But not many, I think. And a good outcome does not mean it was a 'good' decision. Good decisions are carefully thought-out and well-justified, and give the highest probability of success for the majority of people following a certain path. 

Playing the Bench Boost in GW1 was not that. It was a bunch of people succumbing to greedy impulse and hare-brained logic, or just unthinkingly following some online 'guru' or other. And the majority of them were punished for that. (They don't know yet just how badly they were punished; but they'll find out gradually over the next four months, as perhaps a good 60% or 70% of the other managers in the game earn substantially more from their Bench Boost chips.)

I don't think I've come across anyone who can claim to have got an effective points-lift from the Bench Boost this week of more than 10 points; most are much lower. It should be fairly easy to better that later on - once we know what's going on with everyone's form.

And - good grief! - many people were taking the same approach to the Triple Captain chip: "I don't know what to do with it, it's burning a hole in my pocket. Let's just dump it in Gameweek 1, even though I have no idea what any of the results are likely to be, or who's in form yet."

It's a kind of masochism: these people just don't want to do well in the game, they're trying to sabotage themselves. It is very sad.

TOP TIPS for picking the initial FPL squad

 

Now that the Community Shield game is out of the way (I managed to find a suitably grungy little dive bar, The Shamrock, to enjoy it in), it is reasonable to start thinking about the coming season of Fantasy Premier League for the first time.... Although I still wouldn't actually draft a squad until this Friday afternoon!

In a day or two, I'll try to start putting out a few posts with discussions of the main selection dilemmas of the year. (I've already done one on the key conundrum of the new season: which, if any, of this year's three 'super-premium' players might still be unavoidable picks, despite being so horribly over-priced.)

I am here compiling a summary of some of the key advice I've given on choosing the Initial Squad in this game, with links embedded to my original longer posts on each topic, if you want to look into any of them in a bit more detail.

How to choose the INITIAL SQUAD

This is my comprehensive guide on the main principles to keep in mind. Obviously, a lot of the specific player examples are now out of date, but the basic advice should still be clear enough. [I also have a potentially useful - or encouraging - follow-up post on how to assess if you've done a good job with your squad selection.]

You should also try to avoid falling in thrall to the myth of the 'differential', the misguided belief that players can be worth having just because they are low-owned. This is obvious nonsense; you need to focus on points-potential (within the reference-frames of what else you're doing with your squad, and how much money you've got left), not ownership level. [See What a 'differential' is not... and The true meaning of 'differential' for a fuller discussion on this.]

You might also find it useful to keep in mind these rough scales or tiers of points returns and pricing.

And here are a selection of more specific tips...

Don't take a chance on uncertain starters (or new arrivals)

Players new to the league, players who've had injury problems over the summer, players who might still be a bit fatigued after the World Cup, players facing a lot of possible competition for a regular starting slot:... these all have to be avoided in the initial squad. Early in the season, we have enough problems with unexpected dropouts among players we thought we could rely on as nailed starters, without taking any unnecessary extra risks like this.

And likewise,  Beware of double-ups and treble-ups

In general, you want to avoid over-exposing yourself to any one club, even the strongest of them; but especially at the start of the season - when you just don't know (however 'well' they may have appeared to do in pre-season) what their, or anyone else's, form is going to be like in the opening few games.

Stack the midfield  and  The fifth midfield slot is where the value lies

It is amazing how wilfully blind so many FPL managers are about this most obvious and fundamental element of the game: midfielders earn more points than the other positions, and usually dominate the overall player rankings at the end of the season (typically at least 6 or 7 of the Top 10, often as many as 15 of the Top 20). This simple fact dictates that you should be trying to play all 5 midfielders as often as possible - and that that 5th midfielder is likely to be the squad slot that gives you the biggest differential advantage over your rivals!

 

A good rotation pair can beat a premium keeper

A very basic point about goalkeeper selection - but many people seem to fail to grasp it!

Two mid-price picks beat a premium and a dud

While this point is not as invariably and incontrovertibly true with other positions as it is with goalkeepers,.... it is very nearly so.

How to fill the 'bargain' - 'budget enabler' - spots

At the start of the season, when budget is a bit tight, you can't usually afford to spend much on your 4th and 5th defenders or your 3rd forward, and you might be skimping a bit on your back-up keeper and your 4th/5th midfielders too. But you really need to guard against making false economies - especially in midfield.

Defensive premiums aren't usually worth it

You have to think very, very carefully about spending more than 6.0 million on a defender - because, 9 times out of 10, they just won't be that much, if at all better than several of the cheaper rival picks.

And... The super-premiums aren't usually worth it

The most expensive players each year, in any position, are never 'worth it' in pure value-for-money, points-per-pound terms. But I suggest some other criteria by which to evaluate if it may be worth paying a super-high price for a player.

Attacking returns will still (usually) beat 'defensive points'

'Defensive points' are a novelty in the game, only introduced last year (the 25-26 season), so we're still struggling to assess just what impact they are having. I made this prediction last year that, while the new points would be very nice to have, they probably wouldn't on their own make anyone a preferable pick over someone who offered high attacking returns. Many people are not yet convinced of this because... we happened to have a horrible year last year (the lowest-scoring FPL season ever in midfield!). However, the top performers on these new points, in both midfield and defence, also happened to produce quite a good number of attacking contributions as well: they wouldn't have finished so strongly in the overall rankings if they hadn't done well under both headings; and they still wouldn't have been nearly so high up in the final table in any normal year!!

 

NO-ONE is a 'set-and-forget'

FPL managers often naively assume that all they have to do is guess which players are going to end the season with the most points, pick them all, and then.... hang on to them until they get injured. Um, no - it just doesn't work like that. There are very, very few players - not even the season's top points-producers - who are actually worth hanging on to for the entire season.

You NEED your Bench!

Many people ignore and disparage their Bench. But it is super-important, and it is foolish to 'go light' on it - even at the start of the season.

'Dead men' earn NO POINTS; and they LOSE VALUE

In particular, you cannot afford to leave empty seats on your Bench - with injured or non-starting players.

These three broader overviews of 'how the game works' might also be of interest...

What MAKES THE DIFFERENCE in FPL?

This is a quick round-up of the factors that determine whether you finish the season with a high ranking. (Alas and alack, 'player selection' doesn't feature very high!)

Signs an FPL manager doesn't know what they're doing 

A fairly recent post itemising the most common mistakes we see - even in the squads of supposedly 'top' managers!!

And...  Are you a 'good' FPL manager?

My definitive checklist for identifying your possible handicaps and shortcomings in the game.

And I regularly recommend that if you're going to seek help or inspiration from online advice,... you should confine yourself to some of these excellent tactical analysis channels on Youtube.

You can find other bits and pieces of advice on specific topics like this in my Adages, In a Nutshell, and Top TIPS! series. [I never figured out how to differentiate these strands, and have ended up tagging a lot of posts with two or even all three of the labels. The only consistent distinction is that the Adages are (mostly) quite a bit shorter, and have the main point usefully summarised in the post title!]

And lastly, of course,... Remember - it's mostly LUCK!

And..... Remember The ONE GREAT TRUTH of the game.

Beware the 'defcon' MIRAGE...!

 

I have a problem with the new 'defensive points', introduced into the Fantasy Premier League game for the first time last year. I went into some detail on this when the change was first announced; but here's a brief recap - and an expansion.

Why chasing 'defcon points' is probably misguided

1)  They're opaque.  

FPL has still provided no definitions or illustrations of how the various eligible actions are identified (and distinguished from each other!). And there are so many different game actions that might fall under one or more of the eligible categories that it is simply impossible to know from watching a game whether a player of ours has reached the necessary threshold of 'defensive contributions' to earn us extra points or not. We have to take it entirely on trust from Opta. [It is often as arbitrary and mystifying as the operation of the widely reviled 'Bonus Points System' in the game.]

2)  They're unreliable.  

Opta is extremely fallible: they do frequently miscount things. And with these 'defensive points' a miscount of one can make the difference between your guy getting 2 extra points (perhaps unjustly) or getting 0 points (perhaps unjustly).

3) They're unduly sensitive to fine margins of difference in performance (and margins of error in the counting!), and hence very unpredictable. 

Because the thresholds for earning the points are set so high, and being deemed to have come up even one contribution short of that mark means you get no additional points (while you cannot earn any further points beyond the basic 2 points, even if you exceed the threshold by 2x or 3x!!), it is impossible to predict whether a player is likely to attain the points in any particular game; much of the time, the best 'defcon' performers are hitting a number around their 'season average' - which is slightly below the required threshold to earn the points.

4)  The extreme sensitivity of the eligibilty threshold referred to above also makes it difficult to infer with any confidence how players' performance on these points will hold up from one year to the next.

It is impossible to rely on how much consistency players will achieve from one season to another in earning 'defensive points': a player might produce a similarly high level of consistent defensive solidity in his performances, and achieve an almost identical total 'defcon' tally for this season as he did for last, yet come up with a vastly lower return of 'defensive points' - simply because he had unluckily come up just short of the threshold in several matches this time around.

5)  They tend not to be earned in combination with points for anything else. 

Players usually only earn 'defensive points' in games where they're being put under a lot of pressure, where their team is generally having the worst of things. In games like that, they're unlikely to be keeping clean sheets, or featuring well in the Bonus Points - or coming up with any attacking contributions. 'Defensive points' can be a very nice consolation in a game in which your player's team take a bit of a battering; but a good 'defcon' number is rarely allied with a really good weekly points return. (And so, since you're usually rotating out your weakest 1 or 2 defenders, and sometimes your weakest midfielder - you probably often won't be playing your 'defcon monster' picks anyway: because the games that give them the best prospect of earning the 'defensive points' are games in which you don't fancy them to pick up more than 4 points, and the rest of your squad really should be able to do better than that.)

6)  'Defensive contributions' don't register very strongly under the BPS.

You get massively more credit under the 'Bonus Points System' for overall game involvement: a defensive player who gets on the ball a lot and registers a high percentage for pass completion will almost always out-rank one who just has a big day on the 'defensive contributions'. The 'defcons' may occasionally have enough of an impact to raise a player into the bonus points (though, usually, just a single one), in a sterile, low-scoing game where nobody achieves much of a BPS score; but that's only going to amount to a handful of extra points a season, at best. 

7)  The impact of the 'defensive points' last season was massively amplified by other - freakish! - factors.

Last season was - if you allow for the 'defensive points' (probably worth 100-150 points for most people) and the new additional chips (perhaps worth an extra 10-50 points together) - one of the lowest-scoring in the history of the game; and the lowest-scoring ever for midfielders: almost all of the usual highest points-producers - Palmer, Saka, Mbeumo, Cunha, Maddison, Wirtz, Gakpo, Maddison, Mitoma, etc., etc. - suffered seasons blighted by patchy, disppointing form and/or repeated or long-term injuries. Thus, the fact that so many central defensive midfielders finished fairly near the top of the midfield rankings last year, largely as a result of their 'defensive points', is unlikely to be repeated. In fact, only Rice and and Anderson crept into the Top Five midfielders (and Casemiro and and Garner were just in the Top Ten), so - that's still not heavy representation in the upper rankings. And in a more 'normal' season, you'd expect that at least 10 or 12 of the more prolific goalscorers and creators in the position category would comfortably outscore all the defensive midfelders. (Moreover, all of those top CDM performers last year had their ranking buoyed by an unusual number of attacking contributions as well; that's also unlikely to be repeated this year. And a key part of their appeal was their overall consistency, a steady drip-drip-drip of points through most of the season. This means that they were almost always being outperformed over shorter runs of games by several midfielders on a short-lived streak of good attacking form, and thus never really deserved a place in the squad - even though their end-season totals were quite impressive.)

So,.... I'm inclined to think that the allure of the 'defensive points' is a dangerous distraction.

The online forums at the moment are full of people asking Who are the best 'defcon' players?? 

As I said above, we can't necessarily have very high confidence that any of last season's best 'defcon' players will get the same return on these points this year, even if their level of performance is identical. (And there are other issues too: Van Dijk and Tarkowski are getting old, Senesi and Lacroix and Anderson have changed clubs, Garner is injured going into the start of the season, and... Crystal Palace and their previously impressive defence might fall apart without Oliver Glasner.)

And there are a few players who return pretty well on the 'defensive contributions' but offer little prospect of regular points for anything else. Some of the most consistent producers of these points are from weaker teams, who are regularly taking a battering; you generally want to stay away from teams that are going to be foundering down in the bottom third of the table.

Is is best to target defensive players from teams who concede fairly few goals. Teams who concede few goals will also pick up a decent number of clean sheets. No-one this season is going to get anywhere near Arsenal's remarkable haul of 19 clean sheets last time (not even Arsenal!!); but even 7 or 8 or 9 over the season is worth having. And for defenders, it's crucial to escape the slow attrition of shedding points as more goals are conceded; you have to try to avoid players who often take a pasting (this is why gambling on defenders from the promoted clubs, just because they're so cheap, very rarely pays off.)

And because they're 'in games' a lot of the time, not constantly being overwhelmed and only fighting rearguard actions, these sorts of teams have better prospects of picking up an above-average number of attacking contributions too (Sunderland's defenders did particularly well on this last season, for example). The best defenders at teams like this will probably be posting good 'defcon' numbers as well - but they'll be picking up plenty of points for other things too. And those other points are likely to be more reliable and more predictable.  So, that's what your main focus should be on.  'Defensive points' are nice to have, but they're a collateral benefit of being an all-around 'good defensive prospect' in FPL - not the main deciding factor for the selection. 'Defcon' potential can break a tie between two players who appear to you to be inseparable on every other metric; but if you choose a player for their 'defcon' record alone, there are almost certainly going to be alternative picks who might fare slightly less well on the 'defcon' numbers but are likely to do much better overall.

Fantasy World Cup - how much of it is 'LUCK'?

 

Before this World Cup tournament, and this summer Fantasy game, got under way, someone asked on one of the Facebook Fantasy forums if people thought there would be more or less 'skill' involved in the World Cup Fantasy game than there is in our usual Fantasy Premier League. I was inclined to be optimistic that there might be just a little bit more scope for 'skill' in this. But I have come to think that that was foolish of me.

I had thought the large number of available players, and the relative lack of knowledge about them for most Fantasy managers, might offer some scope for rewarding those who took the trouble to do a bit more research to try to identify the most promising options among the ranks of smaller countries and lesser-known players. But....NO, the scoring has been utterly dominated by the handful of top players (Messi, Mbappé, Vini, Bellingham, Haaland, Dembélé, Kane...); being quick to identify the best 'unknowns' has really been of very little advantage.

I had thought that the extra points available as a 'Scouting Bonus' for low-owned players who produced a decent match contribution might also offer an opportunity for managers who were better informed about some of the less well-known teams to pick up a small earned advantage here or there. That worked quite well for me in last summer's Club World Cup; but there were fewer promising players to sift through in that (some teams were so weak that they could be completely discounted from consideration; and few teams were rotating much outside of a 'best eleven'...); also, it seemed to be much easier to find information on how they'd performed over the previous season; and that information was highly relevant, as they were there playing for their domestic clubs rather than their countries, and so could demonstrate established form over a long run of consecutive games - not a luxury we ever have with international teams. So,... NO, the ridiculous FIFA website UI made it virtually impossible to find out which players were even eligible on their ownership level; and just about none of the ones who were actually made enough of a contribution to earn the extra points - so, that was a complete bust as well.

I had thought that the large number of 'premium' players in the competition might put a lot of pressure on the budget, and require tougher, shrewder choices from us in filling out our squads. But in fact, since the budget cap in this game is fairly generous, and is increased for the knockout rounds, and since player prices remain fixed throughout, and no player is priced above 10 million pounds (dollars/euros? I suppose no actual denomination is ever specified...), it's actually not been very difficult at all to afford pretty much everyone we most covet. There might have been some difficult choices to make in attack, with Kane looking in good form in a tournament for once, and Havertz and Olarzabal both looking promising possibilities at the start of the competition. But with Messi being classified as a forward, and he, Mbappé, and Haaland all being in scintillating goalscoring form, it was soon evident that even Kane didn't quite make the cut, and that those three were the essential picks up-front for everyone.

The large number of 'booster' chips on offer in this game might also seem to have offered the possibility of some exercise of 'skill' in deciding how best to use them. But the 'Qualification Bonus' was essentially a money-for-nothing chip that almost anyone could get nearly maximum value from by playing it sensibly in the 'Round of 32'. The 'Wildcard' is simply to be held in reserve as a get-out-of-jail-free card to deal with a possible multiple-eliminations disaster, but might not be needed at all. And the 'Clean Sheet Bonus' - kept back as a 'surprise', and not even explained until the end of the group phase - turned out to be the most stupidly random chip imaginable: extra points for players who concede exactly 1 goal (which is simply impossible to anticipate: you play it whenever you haven't got a more pressing reason to use another chip, and you might make 20 points off it or - more likely - 0 points!!). The other two, more conventional bonus chips, 'Maximum Captain' and '12th Man' might provide some reward for shrewd deployment; but the actual return on them is highly variable - and, just as with the dratted 'Triple Captain' chip in FPL, there is a very strong chance of you making next-to-nothing from them. (In fact, the 'Maximum Captain' is highly likely to return you nothing in this tournament, since, if your highest returner turns out to be Mbappé or Messi, you would have had the armband on them anyway, and are getting no advantage from the chip at all.)

The ability to make full use of our bench via 'manual substitutions' during the course of the MatchDay should also represent some scope for the application of 'skill' - but, in practice, very little. The fairly elementary procedure of stacking all the players who play their games latest in the MatchDay on your bench, and then bringing them in to replace players who've already played and failed to return decent points - well, that's easily mastered by absolutely everyone, and provides no useful differentiation between the vast majority of participating managers.

Yes, there are more decisions to be made in a short period of time in this Fantasy game. But, in my more despairing moments, I am inclined to think that every decision you make is just a further chance for you to be unlucky. 

And there is less time - none at all, really!! - to recover from a bad round in this competition. A few terrible Gameweeks don't completely ruin your chances in a competition that stretches over 38 instalments. But in one that only has 8 rounds (and the last 2 of these barely count, since the last few games of a tournament tend to be quite low-scoring; and with so few options left in the available player pool, there's very little scope for differentiation in squads any more), one or two poor MatchDays can put you right out of contention for a high finish. (Just about all of the front-runners this year have been coasting along on the advantage they gained from extraordinarily lucky performances right at the start of the tournament, when they somehow managed to pull in 130, 140, 150 points from MD1 and/or MD2.)

It hasn't helped, either, that just about all the best players have been in such superb form that they have eclipsed the value that might have been offered by anyone else. This has been a rare case where there really is an unarguable 'template' for a large part of your team: it has been inescapable to have Mbappé, Messi, and Haaland, and Vini and Bellingham, and only when you get down into the middle part of the squad have you started encountering more challenging conundrums as to whether to go for Yamal or Olmo or Dembélé or Olise or Saibari or Manzambi or Macallister or Pulisic, etc.

The one small area where 'skill' might yet prove to have made a bit of a difference is in spreading risk to avoid massive damage from unexpected eliminations. Many managers seem to have been rashly loading up on 5 or 6 players from their favourite teams - which could have left them perhaps needing to spend a few 'hits' to restore a full-strength squad if that team were knocked out. But, as it happens, all four of the 'favourites' came through their quarter-finals OK, so probably almost no-one has been hit by this problem; and it really shouldn't be a concern in the semi-finals (as you don't need a bench for the Final, and can thus afford to lose up to 9 or 10 players).

I was observing to someone the other day that... people will always disagree on exactly how much 'skill' there is at play in our Fantasy Football games. To some people it might feel like a lot; but to others only a very little. But the unfortunate truth is that however much scope for the operation of 'skill' in the game there may be, it ultimately makes almost no difference. There is not much of a spread in skill-level across the reasonably competent and engaged Fantasy managers; the only thing that makes a difference in their outcomes is.... LUCK.

Fantasy World Cup: What are the Booster Chips worth?

 

I've said before that I think one of the main faults with FIFA's Fantasy World Cup game is that it has just too many chips - which it calls 'Boosters'. Subject to the same harsh limitation as in Fantasy Premier League that we can only use one of these at a time, it's really a bit of a struggle to get all 5 of them out of the way in a competition that only has 8 rounds (especially as you probably don't really want to be playing any of them in Round 1 or Round 3; and you may - like me - have occasionally found it impossible to play one when you wanted to because the game website mysteriously unsaved your selection of it!).

Sorry, I appreciate that this little note comes rather too late to be of any help to most people in planning how to use these chips - but perhaps it will still show up in search results in four or eight years' and be of some use in a future Fantasy World Cup game.

In planning how you might use these various chips, I think it's important to form a clear view of how they can be useful and how many points you can hope to make out of them.

Qualification Bonus - this is the most straightforward one: only available after the end of the group phase, it gives you 2 extra points for any points-scoring player in your final eleven who progresses to the next round of the competition. (However, for some bizarre reason, this is calculated as completely separate from all the regular points, and does not enjoy a doubling procedure for your nominated captain.)  Hence, the maximum you can make from this chip is 22 points, 2 points for every point-scoring member of your final eleven.

That actually makes it the most valuable of the chips, and the 'easiest' to realise full value from. However, in order to do this, you almost certainly have to play it in the 'Round of 32'. Thereafter, there are few if any badly mismatched ties, and it becomes harder and harder to correctly anticipate the outcome of all the fixtures in the Round. Correctly identifiying 11 (or 15!) players who will all qualify for the next round is relatively straightforward in the 'Round of 32', but increasingly less so thereafter.

Clean Sheet Shield  -  originally announced only as an additional 'Mystery Booster', we weren't even told what this chip was going to be until during MatchDay 3 (although there had been some accurate leaks online); and, like the Qualification Bonus above, it was only available for use in the knockout stage. This extends your chance to earn clean sheet points by treating a clean sheet as 'conceding no more than 1 goal' rather than 'conceding NO goals'. (It is very difficult to find a description of exactly how this is meant to work, since a description is still omitted from the official 'rules page'! I was pretty sure that the original description I'd seen had suggested that clean sheet protection was being extended to 'conceding no more than 2 goals'; but even if that is what they originally said or implied, that's not actually what's happening.)

Now, in theory this could earn you 5 extra points for a goalkeeper and up to 5 defenders, and 1 extra point for up to 4 midfielders (or 5, if you only field 4 defenders): so, the absolute maximum return is 34 points - very handy. But in practice of course, you're almost certainly going to want to play 2 or 3 forwards (in the 2026 iteration, anyway, it has been absolutely essential to play Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland or Kane in every MatchDay), so that will reduce the number of players who can benefit from the chip; quite probably, you'll only have 3/4 defenders and 3/4 midfielders who are eligible, reducing the reasonable maximum expectation to 24-28 points. (I think, as with the 'Qualification Bonus' above, they do not double this bonus for your captain selection - mean!). 

That's apparently slightly better than the 'Qualification Bonus', but.... you're choosing players, especially your keeper and defenders, because of the likelihood that they will win games comfortably and keep clean sheets; so, most of the time, most of your keeper/defender picks are keeping clean sheets anyway, and you're not getting any benefit from this chip - it's just a kind of 'insurance policy', in case one of your star defensive players unexpectedly concedes a solitary goal. You're only getting extra points for defensive players who concede 1 goal (rather than 0 goals or 2-or-more goals).

In practice, then, you'd be very lucky to make even 15-20 points off this chip. And it carries a very high chance of returning little or nothing (if all of your defensive players either keep a proper clean sheet or concede 2 or more goals...). [I played it in the 'Round of 16' this year and made a lousy 1 point off it - and that only because Bruno Guimaraes was subbed off shortly before Haaland scored his second goal against Brazil!!]

It would have been kinder to offer a bonus chip like this in the group stage, when clean sheets or low goals-against likelihoods are more predictable. Once we get into the knockout rounds, with higher stakes, more closely matched teams, and the possibility of extra time, it becomes more and more possible that matches will become high-scoring, with both sides conceding more than once. In 2026, there was only 1 goalless draw and 3 other clean sheets in the 'Round of 16', with only 4 of the 16 teams conceding only 1 goal (making their players eligible for the benefit of this chip); in the 'Round of 32', there were no goalless draws but 7 real clean sheets, while 12 teams conceded only 1 goal. 

This would suggest that the 'Round of 32' is probably the best round to play this chip in also, but.... it's really a bit of a lottery, just about impossible to predict which teams will concede 1 goal rather than zero.... and you might not want players from those teams (you have to think primarily about factors like how likely they are to score other points for you, and how far into the competition they are likely to progress; you can't just be including players because their fixtures look potentially favourable for this bonus!).

You should have more chance of picking up at least 1 or 2 players who concede only a single goal if you play this chip in a round where you have as many teams as possible represented in your Fantasy side. However, this is a truly random chip, not one you can really plan for; and it probably won't make a lot of difference when you play it. You could even leave it until the Final, when it would be an all-or-nothing play: there is a high chance that neither of the two Finalists will concede only a single goal in the game, but if either of them does, you might have multiple players picking up the useful extra points.

[Both the Qualification Bonus and the Clean Sheet Shield are treated as separate from a player's regular points: they are not doubled for your captain, and they do not count towards the 4-point threshold that a low-owned player needs to reach in order to earn his 'scouting bonus' points. This, to me, seems over-complicated, daft, and petty. And I do not recall seeing it explained anywhere in the rules; I just had to work it out for myself from bitter experience!]

12th Man - this bonus chip allows you to recruit an additional player for one MatchDay only: a 16th squad member who automatically counts as an extra member of your starting team (you can't choose to swap them out for one of your subs if they bomb!). The nice thing about this one is that it is free of any of the usual restrictions on country quotas or budget cap, so if there's a star player you can't quite afford, or an additional member of a top team like France that you covet because they're playing a very weak team and might be fancied to score a lot of goals - this is your opportunity. 

A top MatchDay return from a leading player has typically been in the range of 15-18 points in this tournament, so that's what you can hope to earn from this chip. But of course, even your Mbappés and your Haalands can have a blank here and there, so it might very easily give you little or nothing.

This is a very flexible chip that could be used on any MatchDay when the fixtures seem favourable. But there are two problems with that: i)  most of the other booster chips strongly favour use on a narrower range of MatchDays, so in fact with this one you're limited to the few MatchDays that might be 'left over', unclaimed by higher priority chips; ii)  you're more likely to want to use it while all of the starriest players are still in the tournament, which will bias you towards using it in the group stage or one of the early knockout rounds. I think MD2 in the group stage would probably have been the ideal time to use it this year.

Maximum Captain - this chip simply gives you the double-points score for the captain's armband on whichever of your players actually gives you the biggest return of the MatchDay, without you having to designate him in advance. As just mentioned above, the top scoring player in the MatchDay is typically returning about 15-18 points, so this chip might appear to be worth this much as a maximum. But if you weren't playing the chip, you'd get captaincy double-points from someone; and most of the time, you're picking someone that does actually give you a pretty good return - so the additional lift you could get out of this chip is usually only going to be a few points. At least, that's the case in Rounds 1-6 or 7, because the in-game 'manual changes' facility allows you to change captain between each match, and so you can, if you like, rotate the captaincy through a succession of your strongest players until one of them returns a good haul; especially in the earlier rounds when there are a lot of games, this usually means that you end up with a good score from your captain - possibly your maximum possible, and rarely more than 2-3 points lower.; so, that is the likely true value of this chip. 

However, in the semis you only get to try out two captains, and in the Final, you can't switch your captain at all, you're stuck with your original choice. So, I think this chip potentially has the highest value in the final round, or the penultimate round: you might of course correctly guess who your highest-scoring player in the Semi-Finals or Final is going to be; but there's quite a strong chance you'll pick someone who gives a fairly disappointing return, and in that case, the 'Maximum Captain' chip might have given you an 8 or 10-point, maybe even a 15-point lift.

Wildcard - unlike the other chips, this doesn't directly provide a positive points advantage; it's more of a rebuild chip, allowing you unlimited changes to completely refashion your squad. 

Some are tempted to use it to chase a points advantage early in the competition. Big points in the group stage are usually to be found from the most mismatched fixtures, very strong teams playing the weakest teams; but the teams with the most favourable fixtures might change dramatically between MD1 and MD2, and so you might want to make a lot of changes for MD2. Some are even tempted to use the chip ahead of MD3, because a lot of star players are often rested in the third game, if their teams have already secured first-place qualification in their groups.

However, I generally counsel that it is better to plan your initial squad to try spread optimisation of fixtures across MD1 and MD2, and to accept that MD3 is almost always very low-scoring in Fantasy, and isn't worth expending much effort on (take a few cheap hits if you need to in order to muster an eleven, but don't be wasting the valuable Wildcard on fixing your squad for a MatchDay that rarely produces many points anyway).

The Wildcard is best saved for possible 'emergencies'. As a tournament like this progresses, more and more players pick up injuries, or fall out with the team manager, or get suspended; and then, of course, in each round, half of the players and teams are eliminated - often quite unexpectedly in 'upset' results! This hazard is proving to be particularly extreme in the 2026 tournament because the game's designers have been very nigarrdly in the number of Free Transfers allocated for each round, and also because it's been an unusually competitive tournament, with almost every team playing near the best of their ability, and even some of the lesser teams proving to be quite a handful. After the 'Round of 32', almost none of the ties have been at all easy to predict the outcomes of. 

So, there is a very high chance that in the Quarter-Finals or the Semi-Finals, you may find yourself missing half or more of your squad - and that is when you need to use your Wildcard. (This shouldn't be an issue in the Final because you don't need a bench for that, and you are given 6 Free Transfers after the semi-finals. You should be able to distribute your semi-final picks so that, whatever the match outcomes, you don't lose more than 9 or 10 players - 6 free replacements plus an empty bench!)

IN SUMMARY:

Qualification Bonus:  Near-essential to use it in the 'Round of 32'. Expected yield: 14-22 points. (Maximum yield quite easily attainable!).

Clean Sheet Shield:  An utterly random and unpredictable chip, and largely worthless: only available in the knockout rounds - use it whenever it isn't getting in the way of a more important chip.  Expected yield: 0-12 points. (Maximum yield could theoretically be 24-34 points, but it's very, very unlikely anyone would ever get anywhere near that - and it would be a massive fluke if you did!)

12th Man:  Probably best used in the group stage, especially MatchDay2 - when you've had some indications of form in the first batch of games, and the stakes are still high for everyone (by MD3, a lot of teams have nothing left to play for, and there may be a lot of rotations). But this is a flexible chip that can still bring an advantage in the knockout phase; although you probably want to use it in the earlier rounds of that, when there are more top players to choose from, and you might not be able to afford all of them in your regular squad.  Expected yield: 10-15 points. (The maximum could be even higher, if you're lucky; but of course there is a non-zero chance that it could return you little or nothing!)

Maximum Captain:  Probably best saved for the Semi-Finals or Final, when you have a chance to gain a bigger 'differential' points lift from it, as you no longer have the opportunity to 'maximise' your captaincy return by rotating through multiple selections.  Expected yield: In earlier rounds, probably only 0-5 points (because your regular captain picks would usually do very nearly as well); but in Rounds 7 and 8, perhaps as much as 8-15 points. (Then again, it might easily be worth nothing - because your 'Maximum Captain' turns out to be the player you would have given the armband to anyway!!)

Wildcard: This might be of use sometimes in MatchDay 2, if a lot of your initial picks are in surprisingly bad form, and/or the most promising fixtures in the second batch of games are for very different teams than they were in the tournament openers. However, it is usually far better to save the Wildcard for possible emergency use (even if ultimately not needed, left unused!), to rebuild a squad after suffering heavily from unexpected eliminations going into the Quarter-Final and Semi-Final rounds.  

Expected yield: Impossible to quantify, since it's usually saving you from spending points on 'hits' (additional transfers above your 'free transfer' quota) and giving you additional points from better performances (or at least starters rather than non-starters!) from the players you bring in and, hopefully, giving you additional benefits from those new players through the subsequent rounds also; but conservatively.... 15-20 points!!

BEST OF LUCK!