Almost 10% of the top 10k FPL managers fail to use their first Wildcard

We take our regular look at the chip usage and player selections of the top 10,000 Fantasy Premier League managers.

This is our first article in the series since the deadline for using the first Wildcard passed.

Remarkably, almost one in ten of the top 10,000 FPL bosses (at the point of the Gameweek 21 deadline) didn’t use the first of their two permitted Wildcards.

World number four Michael Somers is among that number.

It’d be interesting to know why so many didn’t deploy it. Lack of a need to because of a hugely successful first half of the season? Or blissful ignorance of the rules?

Given some of the stats we have seen already on the make-up of the top 10k managers in 2019/20, it may be more the latter.

Since the deadline for Gameweek 20 passed, 2.34% have used their second Wildcard.

Around one in five have already deployed their Bench Boost this season and there is a similar usage of the Triple Captain chip, too.

Approximately one in six of the top 10k have used their Free Hit over the last five months or so.

Discounting the first Wildcard, 61.7% of the top 10,000 managers have yet to use any of their chips.

Around 15% have used at least two of their chips, however.

Approximately 50 of the top 10,000 managers have already maxed out their allocation, including the second Wildcard.

For those who have used their second Wildcard, there are some familiar names in the ‘template’ squad.

Kevin De Bruyne (£10.6m) is the most-owned player in these Wildcard sides, sitting in 93.16% of the teams in question.

Jamie Vardy (£10.1m), Sadio Mane (£12.3m), Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.5m) and John Lundstram (£5.1m) were also widely selected.

There was a lack of consensus between the posts, however: two of the three least-owned players in the template squad below are goalkeepers.

There are four differences from the Wildcard ‘template’ to the most-owned squad in the top 10k overall.

Raul Jimenez (£7.5m), Anthony Martial (£7.9m), Adama Traore (£5.6m) and Mathew Ryan (£4.8m) are the differentials of sort in the above graphic, while Nick Pope (£4.7m), Dele Alli (£8.8m), James Maddison (£7.7m) and Marcus Rashford (£9.1m) are the alternatives below.

Just over half of the top 10k captained the sidelined Vardy in Gameweek 21, although there would have been some Mane or Mohamed Salah (£12.3m) vice-captainers amongst that select group who emerged with a 16 or 20-point haul.

Looking in greater detail at the main candidates for the armband in the top 10k below, Salah was the only one who hit a double-digit haul.

As for how the top 10k are set up for Double Gameweek 24, the ownerships for a selection of the various Liverpool double-up and triple-up combinations are currently as follows:

The Mane and Alexander-Arnold combination is by some distance the most popular double-up, while relatively few FPL managers in the top 10k have already lumped on three Liverpool assets (there are other combinations beyond the above, of course).

We’ll surely see those figures rise considerably ahead of Gameweek 24, however.

All data taken from LIVEFPL.NET.