How many premium players to build into a Gameweek 1 team is a dilemma some Fantasy Premier League (FPL) managers face at present.

There is a temptation to fill squads with as many expensive assets as possible, but how many is too many when it comes to potentially compromising the rest of your team?

Owning two premiums allows managers to spread the budget further; owning three stretches the compromises managers make in the peripheral players; owning four means ripping up the unwritten rule book and taking punts on the very cheapest assets to make sure managers can fill their 15 slots.

So what’s the right strategy?

For me, owning three premiums has always been the aim at the beginning of a season. If budget allows for a cheeky fourth then fantastic, but three feels like the magic number in my planning. There are, of course, pros and cons to this strategy.

The Pros

Premium picks are in many ways the perfect bank. With the transfer window remaining open beyond the FPL Gameweek 1 deadline this year, there are bound to be incoming options who we want to own. For example, Chelsea are heavily linked with a move for Romelu Lukaku, Barcelona have announced that Lionel Messi is not re-signing with them and the Harry Kane (£12.5m) saga continues to rumble on.

With it highly likely that a shiny new premium asset will arrive who FPL managers will all covet, owning three big-money players at the Gameweek 1 deadline will mean it is easy for us to move sideways – far easier than it is to try and find the budget to upgrade a mid-priced player.

When Jadon Sancho (£9.5m) signed for Manchester United, there was a lot of excitement in the FPL community. Indeed, a number of managers immediately swapped Bruno Fernandes (£12.0m) for the newest Red Devil attacker. I spent a lot of time thinking about the Sancho/Fernandes conundrum and pondering on whether the saving was worth it across my squad. Whilst the extra £2.5m goes a long way, it leaves a key problem.

If you only own Sancho, and Bruno is the player who starts the season with a bang, it will be incredibly difficult to move from the former to the latter because of budget restraints, meaning at least one other player in your squad will need to be sacrificed – possibly for a hit. In contrast, owning the premium in Bruno at the start of the season makes for an easy swap to Sancho. As a result, starting with the more expensive premium option seems wise as downgrading to mid-priced midfielders is so much easier and less disruptive than moving the other way.

At the end of every season, when you look at the highest points-scoring players, the majority will come from the premium pool. The 2020/21 FPL top scorers were:

• Bruno Fernandes (£12m) – 244 points
• Harry Kane (£12.5m) – 242 points
• Mo Salah (£12.5m) – 231 points
• Heung-Min Son (£10.0m) – 228 points
• Patrick Bamford (£8.0m) – 194 points

Building a team with Fernandes, Kane and Salah in 2020/21 would have scored you over 700 FPL points – seemingly well worth the investment.

But of course, it’s not that simple.

The Cons

It isn’t always all sunshine and rainbows when owning three premiums.

By spending £37m, over a third of your FPL budget, on Salah, Kane and Bruno there will likely have to be sacrifices elsewhere in your squad. FPL managers who choose three premiums will be in many ways reliant on their budget and mid-priced assets hitting form.

In 2020/21, we had a number of these players. Stuart Dallas (£5.5m) and Tomas Soucek (£6.0m), for example, were both incredible assets and did allow managers the ability to own more premiums. The big question is whether this season’s budget enablers will provide such outstanding returns as the likes of Dallas and Soucek did last season.

The 2020/21 campaign also taught us the importance of playing substitutes. In seasons gone by, managers have at times deployed a burner slot on their bench, meaning that they picked the cheapest player available – usually a £4.5m forward or £4.0m defender who never players. However, the impact of Covid last season meant that at many times managers needed their full bench to get a team out, and therefore this is something to be cautious of if you go with three premiums. Covid might not be as disruptive in 2021/22, but it’s difficult to gauge at this juncture.

Managers using the ‘three premiums’ strategy should ensure that doing this still allows them to have players on their bench who can come on if needed and return them FPL points. The likes of Billy Gilmour (£4.5m) and Morgan Gibbs-White (£4.5m) look like they are going to offer value to enable this approach but until the season kicks off and we see the teamsheets, we can’t be certain of this.

Another issue: are premiums that aren’t captained worth owning?

Among the FPL community, some managers argue that it isn’t worth owning a premium player if you aren’t handing them the armband. Whilst I can see this argument, for me owning multiple premiums means that they can act more like differentials in unison as their combined ownership will be lower, therefore only being able to captain one of them each week is less of an issue. Of course, it can be difficult to ensure that you always pick the right FPL skipper when choosing between them!

My opinion: Go Big!

For me, going big on premium assets and owning three is a strategy that, even with some negatives, is well worth it. The benefits that the expensive players can bring means that finding the value elsewhere and changing the other members of your squad to fit the form players and the performing differentials is well worth it.

I’ll be starting the season with Bruno, Salah and either Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.5m) or Andrew Robertson (£7.0m), and I’ll be aiming to find a way to slot Son in there from Gameweek 2!