With Fantasy Premier League (FPL) live for 2024/25, we’ll be welcoming back our team of Hall of Famers and guest writers for the new campaign. Here, former champion Simon March talks us through his Gameweek 1 team reveal.
The opening Gameweeks of an FPL season feel like a mini-game all of their own. The rules are, of course, the same as the overall game, but the challenges are quite unique. Most explicit among these is the degree of uncertainty that we are forced to factor into every decision that we make at this stage. Which players will start? What minutes will they get? Will tactical changes have an impact? Which players will improve, and which players will drop off? How will new signings adapt? How will the promoted teams fare?
With so many unknowns, this part of the season seems a lot easier to get wrong than it is to get right. Over the years, my goal for this stage has evolved from ‘score as many points as possible’ to ‘just don’t give yourself a mountain to climb’. With this in mind, ‘reliability’ as a quality gets a heavy weighting in my selection criteria and, with maybe the odd exception, you’ll see it well reflected within my current squad.
Goalkeepers
My method for picking goalkeepers in recent years is pretty straightforward: look for the teams that concede the most shots from distance and then seek out the highest-ranking £4.5m ‘keepers on that list. The idea is that, because shots from distance are typically easier to repel, goalkeepers in teams that concede a lot of these types of efforts tend to over-index when it comes to the volume of saves that they make. I find that, over the course of a season, optimising for saves tends to offer better value than optimising for clean sheets.
West Ham conceded the highest volume of shots from outside the box last season (234) and, sure enough, Alphonse Areola (£4.5m) racked up the third-highest number of saves (140) after Man Utd’s Andre Onana (£5.0m) and Luton’s Thomas Kaminski. Lending weight to the theory, Luton and United were both among the top four teams for shots conceded from outside the box with 216 and 224 respectively.
Similar logic applies to the selection of Brentford’s Mark Flekken (£4.5m) as my second goalkeeper. While West Ham and Brentford’s rotation is really no better than ‘okay’, it gives me two reasonably solid keeper options at well-established Premier League teams, albeit with West Ham under new management.
Defenders
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