After replacing Agüero (£11.3m) last gameweek, this week thoughts turned to replacing Arnautovic (£7.1m) following the news that the Austrian is set to miss the festive period. For those wondering what to do there’s been no shortage of information to devour with an article, a community article, and not one but two hot topics.

A number of similarly priced alternatives abound meaning a direct swap appears the least complicated answer. However, this might be the moment to upgrade our forward lines – Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (£11.4m) has seen his price rise £0.5m since Monday as he attracts swathes of new owners. Many are now opting for two big hitters up front partnering the Gabonese striker with his north London rival Harry Kane (£12.5m). TheDragon began a hot topic on this subject earlier in the week.

But as Rasping Drive pointed out this is not the only route available – a downgrade to Fulham’s Kamara (£4.3m) is an option allowing a switch to 3-5-2 for those who favour a heavy hitting midfield. Is now really the time to ditch Salah (£13.0m) and Hazard (£11.0m)?

Cigars questioned if we might be making a mistake selling Hazard ahead of a nice run of fixtures for Chelsea once this weekend’s encounter with Premier League leaders Manchester City is behind us.

Along with Arnautovic replacements, this week’s Scoutcast pondered some of the lessons learned so far. Andy reminded us how we took ages to start captaining Salah last season (see 38 minutes 36 seconds in the Scoutcast) and questioned if managers might be about to repeat the mistake by overlooking leading FPL points scorer Raheem Sterling (£11.5m). Sterling has only 2% of the votes in this week’s captain poll.

For help deciding on who to hand the armband to, David has prepared this week’s Captain Sensible article. While Joe and Neale discuss the options in their captaincy video. The Wilmslow Wizard has also been on hand to take a look at captain candidates preparing members tables on the worst defences and best attacking teams over the last four gameweeks. He’s given special attention to Arsenal attacking options as they begin a nice run of fixtures.

If you’re a member and are yet to get to grips with the custom statistics tables, you can view this movie for an explanation of how they work. Also, remember to tag them so that people can find the tables with ease.

For those who might be tempted to heed Andy’s warning and captain Sterling, they will gain confidence from reading David’s article looking for clues as to how City will line-up for their clash against Chelsea. Sterling is set to start and should be fresh after being rested against Watford.

In other news this week, Salah owners were victims of Klopp-tation as the Egyptian began the Burnley match on the bench. In contrast, Merseyside rivals Everton were bearers of good news for FPL managers as a switch to the wing for 32.3% owned Richarlison (£7.3m) saw the Brazilian return a goal and register more shots than he had done in the previous three Premier League fixtures combined.

Finally a special mention to G-Whizz, who each week reliably supplies us with the latest clean sheet odds ahead of the deadline. You may have noticed that in Gameweek 15 there were precisely zero clean sheets, the first time this has happened in over 8 years! Will defences continue their festive generosity this week?

To view all our discussions please visit our Hot Topics page, and if you’ve got some analysis, scout reports or features brewing, be sure to visit our community section to submit your article.

COMMUNITY TOURNAMENTS

The latest draws for both the FFS Cup and FFS Members Cups have taken place. At this stage there are 256 managers left in each cup with the finals not due to take place until Gameweek 24.

In TorresMagic’s Last Man Standing the safety score in Gameweek 14 was 47 points and in Gameweek 15 was 40 points, over the last two gameweeks 339 managers departed leaving 1,621 still standing.

Brayden McCullough, who was world number one for four gameweeks earlier this season, regained the lead in our main FFS League in Gameweek 13, but the new leader after Gameweek 15 is Matthieu Raoux who is now third overall. This is Matthieu’s third FPL season and by far his best. Unlike the two players above him, he has not yet played his wildcard or any other chips.

Tore Bjorheim took the lead in our FFS Members League in Gameweek 14 and has retained that lead. Like Matthieu, he is also in his third season and this is by far his best. He is now ninth overall and second in Norway.

Norwegians are doing remarkably well: there are currently 122 Norwegians in the top 1,000 including World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen at 438. They also make up more than 10% of the top 10,000 with 1,043 managers reaching this impressive benchmark. Whilst there are 3,190 managers from England in the top 10,000 consider that there are ten times more managers in the England league compared to the Norway league – 1,720,513 v 169,636.

Ted Maw (aka Rotation’s Alter Ego) took the lead in the FFS Mods & Cons mini-league in Gameweek 13, but Chris Atkinson (aka RMT Professor) regained the lead in Gameweek 15. Chris played a mini-wildcard ahead of Gameweek 15, making three transfers for the cost of one. He sold Hazard, Martial, and Agüero, and brought in Sané, Son, and Kane, who he captained. This moved gained him 23 immediate transfer points after taking into account the cost of the hit.

Luke Aiello has opened up a 20 point lead at the top of RedLightning’s Top 10k Any Season mini-league and is now 34th overall. He was another manager who captained Kane in Gameweek 15 after selling Agüero.

After the second round of the FFS Manager Melee Community Tournament there are five teams with 100% records and six teams yet to pick up a win. In a head-to-head battle between The Great and The Good and The Top Five this week I was soundly beaten by Greyhead. In fact Greyhead is outperforming all ten managers that he’s currently following in his weekly articles – he holds an 8 point lead over Ville Rönkä. Perhaps they should be following him!

If you are running a community tournament and would like the latest scores included in future Community Round-Ups, please email us a summary of the current leaders and a link to your league, spreadsheet or head-to-head competition at geoff@fantasyfootballscout.co.uk