With the dust now settled, we can now look back and assess the effectiveness of the Fantasy Premier League Free Hit chip in Gameweek 31.

When it came to the reduced four-fixture schedule, many managers chose to plan and use transfers leading up to Saturday, fielding a nearly full squad without the use of the Free Hit.

Others thought it the perfect time to employ the chip, while a third group decided to ignore both solutions and just relied on the small number of players they could muster ahead of yesterday’s deadline.

We won’t be able to weigh up the full merits of these strategies until the season is over and, in particular, the Gameweek 35 Free Hits are played. However, we can compare the intermediate gains from the different approaches employed.

So, let’s present some of these results by trying to answer a list of questions.

Q1: How many extra points and ranks did a Free Hit team gain over non-Free Hitters in Gameweek 31?

Looking at the table above, we can see that Free Hit teams scored, on average, around 20-22 more points than non-Free Hit sides, which appears to be a very decent gain.

Also, teams in the top 100,000 using Free Hit in in Gameweek 31 jumped up around 16,000 places, while those that didn’t suffered an average drop of 12.8k.

However, we know that many teams entered the Gameweek with a small number of players as they’d not planned for the reduced schedule, which caused Free Hitters to make up more ground.

But those managers who did plan leading up to Gameweek 31, suffered less damage to their rank, as indicated by the results in the table.

For example, I was able to field a full 11 players with no Free Hit chip played and achieved a score of 103 (-4) = 99. That was pretty much the same as the average Free Hit team (100.6 in the top 10k).

Am I a good representative for Gameweek 31 planners, or just an anomaly?

That leads me to the second question.

Q2: How many extra points did a Free Hit team gain over non Free Hitters who planned for Gameweek 31?

I took having eight or more players this week as an indicator of a manager planning for the blanks.

The chart below shows the average points gained by teams with eight or more players vs the Free Hit average (now focusing on the top 10k).

It is clear that a Free Hit team still gained around 18-20 points more than the managers who planned for Saturday’s matches.

Even those with 11 players couldn’t match the Free Hit average, mainly due to them fielding non-starters (Moritz Bauer, Oumar Niasse etc) or by taking late transfer hits to acquire nailed-on players.

So my team does look like an outlier, as Free Hitters still gained over planners.

However, that might not be the full picture…

There is a theory that players who planned for Gameweek 31 lost ground over recent Gameweeks as they were unable, or unwilling, to bring in the likes of Riyad Mahrez, Henrikh Mkhtaryan, Son Heung-min ahead of “mediocrity” from Stoke City and Everton.

Time, therefore, to test this theory and see if Free Hitters gained even more than the 20 point gap already discussed.

Q3: Did planning for Gameweek 31 cause more losses over the previous couple of Gameweeks?

To answer this question, I looked back at the past three Gameweeks (28-30) and calculated the points gained in that period for both the managers who activated their Free Hit in Gameweek 31, and those who didn’t.

As suggested by the figure, there is not that significant a statistical difference between “planners” and “Free Hitters”.

The advantage that Free Hitters might have gained is just an extra three points on average over the three Gameweeks.

Therefore, I am more inclined to say that planning for Gameweek 31 didn’t really hurt the average manager.

They might have missed some individual hauls from the likes of Son and Mahrez, but it appears that managers who used the chip and who were not distracted by Gameweek 31 signings also missed out on the bulk of these points.

The last couple of Gameweeks seemed rough, but the statistics suggest that they were rough on the majority of managers.

Q4: How much did a Free Hit team gain over the user’s original set-up?

I went back to all managers in the top 10k who used Free Hit this week and calculated how many points their original teams would have brought in.

I employed two assumptions – that they captained Salah and they would have used their Free Hit to get extra players.

It turns out the average score they would have managed was 80.53 points, so using the Free Hit chip led to a jump to 100.6 points – a gain of 20 (again) over their previous line-ups.

In summary, Fre Hitters gained around 20 points this week over the non-Free Hitters, over Gameweek 31 long-term planners and over their own original teams.

Numbers suggest that planning for Gameweek 31 cost three or so more points, making the net gain for Free Hit users around 23 points.

Finally, I’ll leave you with some statistics about the usage of chips in the new top 10k post-Gameweek 31 and about the point differences between ranks.

As you can see in the table, most ranks are not separated by a huge chasm of points.

For instance, the difference between 20k and 5k is currently just 40 points.

Also, among the current top 10k managers, over 69% have now used their Free Hit, while 47% have spent their second Wildcard.

That suggests that the remaining seven Gameweeks will see a big shift in rank as the effects of the double Gameweeks and the chips still to be employed shake things up once again.