How To Win At Fantasy Premier League (FPL)
How To Win At Fantasy Premier League (FPL)
Hints & Tips From Beating Betting On YouTube
Full Transcription To Nail Your Strategy
What’s up everyone. Welcome to this video in which we’re going to be looking at how you can win a Fantasy Premier League. First things first, why should you even listen to me? A couple of years ago, I actually created a Fantasy Premier League beginner’s guide. It was an article with an infographic and it got quite a lot of attention, got shared on a few websites around the world.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been gradually improving it, changing the format a bit and now it’s been viewed by I think over 17,000 people on the Beating Betting website alone, that’s my website. If you want to check it out and learn about that, you can do so, there’s a link in the description below. It’s not just been viewed on this website, the infographic has been shared on various other websites around the world, newspapers, football forums fantasy football forums.
It’s been viewed thousands and thousands of times on Reddit as well. I’m pretty confident in the fact that the guide is pretty good. It also tends to get really good feedback. I originally created it to be a beginner guide to what is beginner friendly. A lot of people told me that they’ve been playing the game for years and they still find the guide useful, they still find tips that they can use to improve their game.
You should find this video helpful if it’s your first season playing or even if you’re an experienced player that doesn’t quite finish as high up in the rankings as they want to. It’s also worth noting that everything I say in this video is typically regarded as best practice. That doesn’t mean that you can’t deviate away from the strategies I talk about, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the best thing to do week in week out or season in season out.
However, over the course of 10, 15 years that Fantasy Premier League’s been running, these strategies are what helped people win. There may be some things that I say which you disagree with, and that’s fine, you can jump on them in the comments below. However, please take everything I say with a pinch of salt. As I say it’s general best practice advice and you’re more than welcome to try different things if you want.
If you’re interested in winning your mini-leagues and obtaining a high overall ranking, watch this video through to the end, hit that like button if you find anything useful and subscribe to the channel if you’re interested in more football, fantasy football and betting related videos going forward.
Let's Get Stuck In
The first thing that we’re going to talk about is how you should be spending your initial budget and the breakdown between goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, and forwards and how much money you should typically be spending on each position. First up, we’ve got goalkeepers and I recommend that you should be spending between 9 and 10 million on your goalkeepers.
This means you could have a 4.5 and a 4.5 rotation option, you can have a 5.0 and a 4.5, you can have two 5.0s if you want, although this isn’t really advised, that’s probably not going to be the most profitable strategy because you’re tying up quite a lot money on the bench there. You’re going to have to bench at least half a million’s worth of player every single week. That’s probably not the best strategy.
You could go for two 4.5s, a 5.0 and a 4.5, you could go for a 5.5 and a 4.5. Again, that’s a little bit expensive but it could be done. My line of thinking is if you’re spending 5.5 on a goalkeeper, then you should really be playing them every single week. That includes 6.0 goalkeepers as well. You should probably be taking the risk and pairing them with a 4.0 goalkeeper.
Even if they don’t play, you can’t invest in 10.5 in your goalkeepers, in my opinion. I just think that’s way too much money to be tying up in the least profitable position on the pitch.
Defenders
Moving on to defenders now. I typically recommend that you spend between 23.5 and 26 million on your defenders. What kind of breakdown would you get from this?
Well, you could have two premium defenders this is 5.5 to 6.5 range, you could combine those with three 4.5 or even 4.0 defenders if you find some that are playing. That typically is a good balance in your defense or you could go with the three lower premium brackets. These are the 5.0 to 5.5 range and pair those with cheaper defenders as well as your backups. It’s a common beginner mistake to overinvest in your defense.
Remember that over the course of however many years, Fantasy Premier League has been running three at the back formations have almost always been the most profitable if not every single year. That’s why you don’t want to overinvest, but you don’t want to be playing four or five defenders every single week. Yes, there are going to be times when playing more than three defenders is the most valuable strategy.
Over the long term, this has been proven to be not the best strategy. With regards to the types of defenders you’re picking, you’re going to want to look to those that keep a large amount of clean sheets and those that get forward, those that take set pieces, those that make aggressive runs regularly and get crosses in or those that are center backs and they go for set pieces and they get their head on a lot of crosses. The general advice there is those that keep clean sheets and those that could potentially get attacking returns as well.
Midfielders
Let’s move on to midfielders now. In the midfield, you could probably have two or three premium midfielders and the premium prices in the midfield range of 8.5 to 13 million. You’re then going to want to pair these with one or two lower value midfielders that are still reasonably priced usually. Remember, price doesn’t always dictate performance, but it’s all about balance and best practice.
You’re then going to want one or two midfielders less often this six to eight range, maybe 5.8 to eight range and you’re going to want a backup midfielder at 4.5, that is if you’re going to be playing a four in midfield formation which is three up front, which is 3-4-3 pars, traditionally being the best formation that you could possibly play. However, you don’t have to have a 4.5 backup, you could have 3-5-2 formation where your backup is in the forwards, but we’ll move on to that shortly.
A top tip for this section is another mistake that people make is they have something that is called a strong front eight. What I mean by having a strong front eight is that you’ve got eight players where you’ve invested the funds spread out between them all evenly. That is not a good strategy because you’re going to be leaving to much money on the bench and therefore you’re not going to be earning these points in your team.
This is why it’s good to always make sure you’ve got a backup option that you know is going to be your bench option each week and you want to make sure that this player is someone that plays 90 minutes every week. If you do get an injury or a random rotation in your team, you want to make sure that this 4.5 or backup midfielder does fill the role into two or three points at the minimum.
With regards to the types of midfielder you need, you generally want to look to the most selfish players possible. Now, whilst selfish players aren’t perhaps the greatest in real life football teams, they are perfect for your fantasy football team because they’re going to get a lot of shots, therefore they’re going to pick up a lot of goals, hopefully, they might pick up a lot of assists from rebounds.
If they do manage to get a couple of goals that likely going to be in the bonus points as well. You also want to try to look towards set-piece takers corners, free kicks, penalties as well, especially penalties you want to try and avoid defensive midfielders, they might be very good in real life but they are not good at fantasy at all.
Forwards
Moving on to the forwards now. Most people will have two premium forwards at least, sometimes people will have three, but generally, this isn’t the best play. You want to look between two premium forwards as in the 9 to 13 price range and a backup which is in the 6 to 8.5 range, or if you are going to just play two upfront and have five in the midfield, then you can look towards a 4.5 or perhaps a 5.0 upfront, although again a 5.0 would tie upfronts on your bench. You could be using that half a million in your team elsewhere.
An important point to make that is if you are bringing in an 11 million player or more of them in your team, that’s throughout the midfielders and the forwards, you need to be captaining them almost all the time to make that a good decision. If you’re looking to have three players in your team that cost 11 million or more, probably better off spending some of those funds elsewhere and having just the one or two.
Think of it like this, if you’ve got 16 million to spend and you pair it between an 11 million player and a five million player or you look at two eight million players, those two eight million players are probably going to outscore the 11 million and the five million when you’re not captaining any of those players. This is because it’s very, very hard to find a good five million point scorer, but it’s not that hard to find good point scorers in the eight range.
When it comes to picking your best players, make sure that you can captain them regularly. If you’re spending 13 million on a certain player, you’re going to want to make sure that you captain almost every single week. The types of forwards that you want to look at, you want to make sure that they’re nailed on, they’re guaranteed to start every single game, they’re selfish again, they’re hopefully on penalties.
You also want to look to teams that play one upfront a lot of the time. This isn’t always the case, but you want to make sure they’re the focal point of the attack, you don’t want them to be sharing returns ideally unless they’re very, very cheap. Let’s move on from the team structure now and talk about some of the other things. I want to stick on the topic of choosing your players, first of all, and I want to talk about the myth of owning unique players or differentials.
Now the myth is the owning differentials and the key to rising up the leaderboard rapidly. These differential players that are typically owned by less than 10% of the game or maybe even less than 5% of the game. The main reason that this isn’t a good idea is because of the risk-reward scenario. If 25% of the game own one player and you think you’re being smart by picking another player, the risk is if the player does well that you don’t own, you’re going to be behind so many people and playing catch up won’t be that easy.
The secret to Fantasy Football success is actually playing incredibly boring most of the time. You want to cover the players that most people own unless you know they’re a terrible option. I’m going to name Cante in this. A lot of people always select Cante but he’s a terrible Fantasy Premier League option.
Generally speaking, covering the highly owned, highly performing players is by far the best option you can do. You want to play it safe wherever possible, keep yourself in the game until the end. If you need to catch up, if you need to make a charge for the win or a charge up the overall rankings then the last four to five weeks or maybe even a less than that, maybe even the last two to three weeks, they’re your best time to be looking towards differentials.
Don’t try and take punts. Be smart all through the season because you just won’t be victorious doing this, I can assure you. Fantasy Premier League is a marathon and not a sprint.
Transfers
Let’s talk about transfers and wildcard now. In Fantasy Premier League you get one free transfer every week and if you don’t use it, it rolls over to the next week, but you can only have a maximum of two.
There are three important transfer rules that I want you to try and follow. First of those is that using two free transfers in one go is significantly better than using one free transfer two weeks running. This is because it gives you flexibility to change your team structure around. You can swap a midfielder and a forward out and you could go for a premium option in one and swap them around, so you’ve now got a premium option in the other position.
Flexibility, you don’t have if you only have one free transfer. It also gives you a safety net if something goes wrong. What if you don’t really need to make a change in your team then suddenly the next week you’ve got a transfer you want to make and you pick up an injury or a suspension? It just gives you that safety blanket that can keep you comfortable in some potentially difficult times.
The second tip, and this one is hotly debated, but I do emphasize it, do not take unnecessary point sets. Every additional transfer that you want to take that isn’t a free one, it will cost you four points. Now, a lot of people will say actually taking four point hits is profitable, but you can gain team value and gaining team value is very important, but that isn’t really the point I’m making. The point I’m making is not to take unnecessary ones. If you’re looking to build some team value here or if you really need to take a minus four, then take it only if it’s necessary to your overall game strategy.
Most of the time minus fours, won’t be profitable, especially if you’re taking them regularly because it means you’re not giving the players enough time to actually earn a profit on the transfer. The overall winner of the game will almost always have taken hardly any point sets. You can argue that they do this because they’ve already got a good team, they’re already winning and they don’t need to.
Yes, that is a good point, but look at the people that finish in the top 10K on the top 20K, very rarely they’ll take two points with a hit. They’ll always be outliers, there will always be people in those top rankings that have them so, but a safer strategy is usually the way to go. The final rule regarding transfers is try to leave them as late as possible. This is another one that’s hotly debated same with the minus four thing.
Again, it’s try to leave them as late as possible. If you can’t leave it any later than the Monday, with the games on a Saturday, then make it then, this could be because you’re going to lose 0.2 million in transfers. Personally, I don’t really mind losing 0.2 every now and again. If you can’t wait any longer, if you actually can’t wait perhaps you won’t be able to afford the players any longer, make the transfer, but leave it as late as you possibly can.
If you’ve already got half a million in the bank and you’re going to make transfer, wait until the Friday night or the Saturday morning. Don’t take unnecessary risks what if that player or another one of your players gets injured in training throughout the week or perhaps they’ve got cup games in the week. This is very, very important as always FA Cup, League Cup, Champions League, Europa League taking place in the middle of the week, you want to try and make sure you make the transfers after those games wherever possible.
Wildcards
Wildcards, I’m not going to go into too much detail around wildcards. However, generally speaking, I think it’s best to not plan to use your wildcard. A lot of people plan to use an early one and this is fine. You can often pick up early value from an early wildcard, increase your team value. I don’t like to plan to use it.
What I like to think is yes, I will probably look to use it early, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to have to do that. I want to give myself the flexibility to carry on long term if I want. This means in my game week one team, I’m not going to pick loads of players I know are going to be rested or rotated out of the squad in a couple of weeks time. I might pick one or two players at most that I know what we dropped sometime after the first few weeks.
However, I want to make sure that that wildcard can be a backup option if I need it. You’re going to need to use that first one before the end of December and usually I’ll use it sometime between game week three or four at the earliest and probably game week 10 or 11 at the latest. You don’t always have to use it if you’re doing really well. You don’t even have to use it.
The truth is there’s no real best time to use this first wildcard, but it definitely is a best time to use that second one that comes after January in the second half of the year. Do not use this second wildcard at a time when it’s not a double game week coming up. Double game week is when teams get to playing more than once in the same game week. I know that sounds very obvious and self-explanatory, but it’s within the same game week, so that they actually earn twice as many points potentially as they would normally.
You want to use your wildcard around these time periods, so you can get as many double game week players in as possible and captain them and earn as many points as you possibly can. I know I said avoid taking point sets a little earlier, but honestly, if you’ve got two or three injuries in your team and it’s February time, and you’re thinking I need to use my wildcard, don’t do it.
Either use your bench options that’s what they’re there for, take a week or two of lower scores because you will earn a significant amount of points by timing your second wildcard correctly or just take a small point set. Do not use that wildcard and do not use the next trip that we’re going to look up either the free hit.
Free Hit
Free hit is incredibly valuable, but it’s best used in a blank game week. Blank game week is when teams miss out. Those with a double game week have to have a blank game week at some point, otherwise they would have too many games in the fixture list and that wouldn’t work out properly. What you want to do is you want to have that wildcard to bring in the double game weak players.
Be then want to be able to use the free hit to bring in blank game week players. These players will only play for one week and then the free hit expires and your old team returns i.e. that double game week team that you’ve already built. Save your free hit for blank game weeks. Trust me. Triple captain. You also want to use this triple captain in a double game where possible.
Many many players have been burned over the years by waiting for these double game weeks. It’s just variants it’s a short-term bad luck, the EV or the expected value of using your triple captain in a double game which is significantly higher than a single game week, there’s always going to be a good player with good expected value in a week.
People will say, “Oh, I’d rather have a good player playing at home against a rotation candidate than playing two half-decent fixtures in a double game week in which they’re probably gonna get rotated in one.” I’d rather have a player playing for 135, 140 minutes minimum across two games than that player playing for 90 minutes in one.
Something that’s often overlooked is that when they are playing a lower or weaker team, they could be rested themselves in that game or they could start to do well they could be two or three nil up and then gets subbed off and save for a more important match. That’s always an important factor to remember as well. Expected value of a triple captain in a double game week is incredibly high compared to a single game week, almost always.
Bench Boost
The bench boost, that’s pretty similar as well hopefully there’s two or three decent game weeks in a season. You can use the bench boost in one. The general strategy is something like this. Yes, it’s going to vary. You’re going to want to use your wildcard before a double game week, a week before. You’ve then going to want to triple captain or bench boost in the first double game week, you will then usually have a blank so you will free hit.
Then after that one you will hopefully have another double game week within one or two weeks where you can use either the triple captain or the bench boost, the one that you didn’t already use. It’s worth noting if that wasn’t already clear, then you can only use one chip each week and that includes your wildcard as well.
Conclusion - Get Winning At Fantasy Football
What do you think of the tips that have been given in this video? I’d love to hear it from you. Let me know if you think they’re good or bad if you agree or disagree with certain parts. Make sure you drop a comment down below. If you have found this video useful, hit that like button and share it with your friends as well. It’s always better to have a competitive mini league.
You don’t let your friends give up after a few weeks. Make sure they know these tips and that you can keep it competitive until the end of the year. Hopefully, you can use this to win your mini league. You are interested in more fantasy football or betting related content, hit that subscribe button as well. I look forward to seeing you again in another video and until next time, have a great day.
