This is truly Wildcard season. Managers have put the chip in play and used what has felt like a long international break to rid themselves of Gameweek 31 “mediocrity” and prepare for the Double Gameweeks in 34 and potentially 37.
The players selected in these Wildcards may well vary depending on the strategy for the rest of the season, and might, in particular, depend on whether the Free Hit chip is still intact to handle the missing fixtures in Gameweek 35.
The purpose of this post-deadline article is to shed some light on the selections made by Gameweek 32 Wildcarders and how the Free Hit may have influenced their decision making.
This will help managers who are yet to Wildcard identify the popular player selections, and also give those who have already Wildcarded an idea of what they are up against and how they compare.
Collecting the data for all the top 100k Fantasy Premier League managers, we see that 15.87% of them chose to Wildcard this week to raise the total percentage of top 100k managers who used the chip from 43.36% to 59.22%.
Meanwhile, for the top 10k managers, the percentage of Wildcards is much higher. Wildcards used went from 39.21% to 60.74% with 21.53% activating the chip this week.
The percentages together with their Free Hit availability are shown in the table below.
| % of WCs | % of Wildcarders with FH remaining | % of Wildcarders with no FH remaining | |
| Top 10k | 21.53% | 63.82% | 36.18% |
| Top 100k | 15.87% | 58.28% | 41.72% |
To get an idea about how other chips were played this week and how that raised the use of all chips in the top 10k and 100k managers, we plot the chip use before and after the deadline.
We see that the Wildcard is the only chip that gained a significant boost in use, just as we expected.
There are still around 40% of top-ranked managers who are yet to use their Wildcard, with maybe a big percentage of them deploying the chip ahead of Gameweek 33.
It will be interesting to see whether the decision to delay will change their choices.
For example, there could be more emphasis on Romelu Lukaku and Ashley Barnes instead of the likes of Johann Gudmundsson and Eric Bailly, who both missed out today.
Now, let’s move to look at the most popular picks for Wildcard managers.
The following two images show the most selected players for Gameweek 32 Wildcarders who still own the Free Hit, alongside the line-up for those without that chip to play.
We can see the choices are very similar with just Lukaku featuring more in teams without Fee Hit, while Roberto Firmino is in more teams with the Free Hit still to play. That is somewhat surprising since it’s Firmino who has a fixture in Gameweek 35.
However, delving deeper, the Lukaku and Firmino ownership for both groups of managers is very close. I feel that we can put them both on equal footing since they come with 48.5% and 48.1% for teams with no Free Hit remaining, and 47.8% and 47.9% for those squads with the chip still intact.
Therefore, we can say that the picks for both parties are essentially the same.
It seems that regardless of whether Gameweek 32 Wildcard managers still had the Free Hit available or not, they chose to follow the “template” which turns out to be not just popular here on Fantasy Football Scout, but also among the top 100k.
The next most highly owned players in Wildcards that are not shown in the image are: Nick Pope in goal, Shkodran Mustafi and James Tarkowski in defence, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Kennedy in midfield and Barnes in attack.
Again those players show similar percentages for managers with and without Free Hit.
To look at the bias of Double Gameweek teams, and whether managers without Free Hit will tend to favour teams who have a fixture in Gameweek 35, we have plotted the average number of players from each Premier League team in Wildcard squads.
Again, we see no significant difference between the two groups of managers.
Leicester is the most popular source of talent for Wildcard managers with more than two players per squad.
Liverpool and Arsenal, who don’t play twice in Gameweek 34, rank in third and fifth places showing that most managers opted to keep the likes of Mohamed Salah, Firmino, Andrew Robertson, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Mustafi rather than just focus purely on Double Gameweek options.
In summary, the template picks are widespread amongst the top managers’ Wildcards, and those who don’t have their Free Hit also chose to follow it.
With the Wildcards and planning ahead, we will now look at the ongoing Gameweek and the exact selection statistics for the top 100k managers.
Given how close the gap is within those teams, they give a better sample of active players than just the top 10k.
The Gameweek 32 Captaincy
Salah continues to be the top choice this week, providing a consistent return of 7 points for the 75.01% managers that favoured him.
The 11.95% managers who chose the differential Aubameyang will now be waiting anxiously to see if he can match or better the Egyptians output against Stoke City.
Next, we present the players with the biggest Effective Ownership (EO), which is the regular ownership plus captaincy, in each position in the top 100k.
| GK | EO | DEF | EO |
| David de Gea | 47.23% | Nicolás Otamendi | 44.45% |
| Robert Elliot | 24.23% | Ben Davies | 33.10% |
| Nick Pope | 20.53% | Andrew Robertson | 26.88% |
| Lukasz Fabianski | 11.14% | Ben Mee | 22.94% |
| Mathew Ryan | 11.03% | Marcos Alonso | 20.00% |
| Ben Foster | 10.47% | César Azpilicueta | 17.33% |
| Adrián | 7.10% | Virgil van Dijk | 15.97% |
| Jonas Lössl | 6.97% | Matthew Lowton | 15.05% |
| MID | EO | FWD | EO |
| Mohamed Salah | 174.66% | Roberto Firmino | 79.22% |
| Heung-Min Son | 36.63% | Aubameyang | 55.65% |
| Riyad Mahrez | 34.77% | Romelu Lukaku | 37.81% |
| Raheem Sterling | 26.62% | Jamie Vardy | 30.43% |
| Willian | 21.20% | Callum Wilson | 18.83% |
| Pascal Groß | 21.14% | Glenn Murray | 10.69% |
| Xherdan Shaqiri | 18.82% | Sergio Agüero | 10.66% |
| Henrikh Mkhitaryan | 18.81% | Jordan Ayew | 9.23% |
Finally, I was curious to know which countries were present the most in the top 100k. So I leave you with the top-ranked territories in Fantasy Premier League so far.
After the expected English dominance come the Egyptians (including myself) who are enjoying a great season thanks to probably trusting Salah very early in the campaign.
