At its core the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game is about scoring the most points per million pounds spent (ppm), while spending all 100.0 of your budget. PPM is what we call ‘value’. If you can maintain a the team with the best value for the whole season, theoretically you should have the most points possible.
We all know it’s not that simple, ‘playing for maximum points value’ may be optimal, but it’s far from easy. As a result there are a lot of other viable FPL strategies. If your strategy is to have a team with five heavy-hitters, some 4.0 bench fodder and a budget defence, this guide isn’t going to give you that.
I’m going to try and break down how I would build a Wildcard team using a value-focused strategy. The end result will be a team that’s balanced, has high-value players throughout, and a couple of heavy-hitters.
Finding the Value
First, let’s start by taking the top value players (so far) in each position and then calculating their average price and average points per million (ppm).
- GKs | 4.75 | 8.63 ppm
- Def | 5.21 | 9.09 ppm
- Mid | 5.94 | 8.43 ppm
- Fwd | 5.73 | 8 ppm
Immediately you should notice two things:
– The best value players are cheap, really cheap.
– The best value positions are defenders, and forwards are the worst.
I think this is typically true every year. What this means is that, counter-intuitively, we should want as much money as possible in defence. This is easier said than done though, since top defenders are so much cheaper than top midfielders and forwards. Also, mostly it’s the cheap goalies (<5.0) that are good value, so it’s hard to spend big here either.
With that in mind, let’s use the above averages (multiplied by the number of slots) to get a rough idea of the balance of our “maximum value” team:
2 GKs = 9.5 (11%)
5 Def = 26.0 (31%)
5 Mid = 30.0 (36%)
3 Fwd = 17.5.0 (21%)
————
Total = 83.0
Pretty self-explanatory… Now let’s look at some of the players involved in the data above and build a realistic best-value team for the first 11 Gameweeks.
Fraser Forster (Tom Heaton)
Nathaniel Clyne, Fabricio Colocinni, Leighton Baines (Phil Jagielka, Calum Chambers)
Victor Wanyama, Nacer Chadli, Stewart Downing, Gylfi Sigurdsson (Seb Larsson)
Saido Berahino, Charlie Austin, Diafra Sakho
Now, stick with me. This maybe isn’t a team that inspires confidence, and there aren’t many obvious captains (we’ll come to that later). But without subs or transfers and Baines as perma-captain…this team would give you around 685 points and a 1.4k rank! (all for 84.0).
NOTES
– Without rules, the best-value team would have six Southampton players (without Dusan Tadic or Graziano Pelle!).
– For realism, I deliberately didn’t treble up on the Southampton defence or double on the Newcastle defence.
Building Your Team
Taking the above as our starting point, we’re going to try and make a Wildcard template out of all of that analysis:
[4.5] [4.5] = 9.0
[7.0] [6.0] [5.0] [4.5] [4.5] = 27.0
[8.5] [7.0] [7.0] [6.0] [4.5] = 33.0
[6.0] [6.0] [6.0] = 18.0
Total = 87.0
Now comes the fun part, every unspent 1.0 has a ppm of 0 (not good), so let’s spend that last 13.0! This is where you pick your heavy hitters, your Gameweek captain choices. You should still pick the best value players though (so no Yaya Toure or Robin van Persie!).
Let’s run through an example thought process:
- The best value players who cost a bit more are Leighton Baines, Alexis Sanchez and Graziano Pelle.
- I’m happy with Chadli/Sigurdsson/Downing, who are slightly below budget (+1.3).
- Let’s upgrade the [8.5] to Sanchez (-2.4).
- Let’s upgrade a [6.0] to Aguero (-6.7).
We still have a little over 5.0 to spend. Possible options are:
- Upgrade a midfielder to Eden Hazard and a 6.0-priced forward to Pelle.
- Upgrade a 6.0 forward to Diego Costa
- Upgrade a midfielder to Angel Di Mari, Raheem Sterling, Theo Walcott, Aaron Ramsey or Christian Eriksen
- Upgrade a 6.0 forward to Radamel Falcao or Danny Welbeck
Ok, the last one is not so realistic, but you get the idea. FPL options are changing all the time; be creative. When you’re done, a possible Wildcard team might look like:
Tim Krul (Brad Guzan)
Leighton Baines, Cesar Azpilicueta, Calum Chambers, Neil Taylor, Kieran Trippier
Alexis Sanchez, Gylfi Sigurdsson, Stewart Downing or Eden Hazard, Nacer Chadli, George Boyd
Sergio Aguero, Diego Costa or Diafra Sakho, Charlie Austin
That team is worth ~£100m and uses current prices. A lot of players will have more cash than that to play with, but overall I’d be happy with that team in the short-/mid-term (it’s only an example anyway!).
Final Points
A few tips on this kind of team:
– You won’t have all the heavy-hitters, so just focus on having the best captains
– Your defence will be good, don’t be afraid to play four at the back from time to time
– Owning the right defenders at the right times will be important as attackers
You should now have a good idea how to repeat this kind of Wildcarding process later in the season, when the FPL landscape has changed a bit. As with all FPL strategies, the hard part is picking the value players before they are done scoring all their points; going onto the FPL site and sorting by value will only get you so far. It is vital to always be on the look out for exciting options with a budget price tag.
9 years, 4 months ago
this is excellent. Will refer back in January....any may actually refer back even sooner if my gwk 13 wildcard plans come to fruition