Gameweek 31 has kicked off, as has a new series of articles that will present key statistics of the top 10,000 ranked Fantasy Premier League managers’ team selections every week.

The goal is to provide managers with a sense of the damage, or gain, they can anticipate as the Gameweek unfolds by understanding what a good sample of active teams have done.

Given how unusual Gameweek 31 is, we focus our analysis this time on the Free Hit use and the number of active Gameweek 31 players in the top 10,000 placings.

Here are the most relevant stats:

The number of Free Hit teams in the top 10k is 2532 – a percentage of 25.32%.

The average number of points deducted in non-Free Hit teams is -2.02, with the full distribution below:

The average number of Gameweek 31 players in all teams is 9.43 (counting all players from today’s eight matches for now, even the ones who didn’t/won’t feature).

Analysis of who featured/versus who did not will be presented in another article after the Gameweek ends.

Teams using the Free Hit chip have an average number of players of 14.67, while teams with no Free Hit have 7.65 with the following distribution:

Now, let’s dig deeper into the Gameweek 31 players and see which teams have contributed the most.

The following figure shows how many players each team is contributing on average to active managers:

We see an understandable dominance of Liverpool players (2.86 players per manager) as they’re the only top-six team with a fixture this week. Bournemouth assets place second.

To quantify the Liverpool percentages more, let’s look at how many teams own three, two, one or zero players from Jurgen Klopp’s side.

Over 87.6% own three Liverpool players and over 98% of players have at least two.

Taking a look at the captain and vice-captain choices, we see a possible record for captaincy among the top 10k, with Mohamed Salah handed the armband by 88.8%. That figure will definitely go higher by the end of the Gameweek as the captainers of Sergio Aguero, Harry Kane etc could have Salah as their vice-captain.

Roberto Firmino is in second place, with only 4.28%.

Vice-captaincy stats are also dominated by Liverpool assets, with Firmino being selected by 56.56% of managers, Mane 10.37% and Salah 6.37%.

Finally, here’s a table of the most-owned eight players in each position this week (showing only players with a fixture).

With this week being a prime candidate for the Free Hit to be played, we present the template squad created by those playing the chip.

It’s slightly different than the most selected players in all teams due to the freedom Free Hitters have in choosing nailed-on and in-form players.

Butland 52.53%, Lössl 48.38%

Baines 68.25%, Schindler 59.91%, van Aanholt 59.28%, Aké 55.53%, Zouma 32.31%

Salah 99.72%, Mané 77.37%, Zaha 62.52%, Shaqiri 61.69%, Stanislas 61.57%

Firmino 98.78%, Wilson 58.89%, Mounie 49.17%

We will follow up tomorrow with the results of this Gameweek and an analysis of how much Free Hit users gained.

Also, if you have similar statistics that you want to be included in future articles, please leave your suggestions in a comment.