FPL Gameweek 17 restart: The case for Salah

With Fantasy Premier League (FPL) resuming on Boxing Day, we’ll be welcoming back our stellar team of Pro Pundits and Hall of Famers for the restart.

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Here, two-time Indian FPL champion Lateriser speaks about Mohamed Salah and the returnees from Qatar.

It’s time to wake up from hibernation: the beast that is Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is creeping up on us.

I did a little pod on Thursday night which got the FPL juices flowing and I’m here to freestyle ramble and note down some of my thoughts.

THE CASE FOR SALAH

First up, let’s talk about Mohamed Salah (£12.8m). He has been well rested, just like a lot of his team-mates, and Jurgen Klopp had visibly placed him closer to goal in the final stretch before we had to pause for the World Cup.

This was evidenced in the underlying data, as well, when you compare Salah’s first ten Gameweeks versus Gameweeks 11 to 16 (all figures below are per 90 minutes):

PLAYERS RETURNING FROM THE WORLD CUP

There’s a lot of conversation about how we should assess players returning from the World Cup. We’ve had a couple of managers speak about the same. This is what Erik ten Hag said in an interview on the official Manchester United website:

“We had a plan, we have prepared the players with what the plan is so there can’t be any confusion about what the programme is. We make the players aware of the fact that, after you are out of the World Cup, you have to return to the club and the league immediately goes on. You have to be ready for that, but I think our players are used to it. Our players are winners, and they are battling now for the World Cup and in the moment they are out – hopefully one is the winner – they have to deal with that. With the success they have, or the defeats, they have to deal with it and of course they have to be ready for another challenge.”

From this, it does sound to me that players eliminated from the World Cup – at least in United’s case – will probably be back sooner than most people think. It is interesting that ten Hag mentioned that this was pre-agreed with players.

I do think we are slightly more worried than we should be as there are a lot of games to be played as soon as the Premier League resumes and the above quote has me more optimistic than before in terms of how many players we can expect back when.

I think we might need to worry about those playing the final but outside of that, I expect even the losing semi-finalists who play a third-place play-off to be back soon. We’ll obviously know more about this closer to Boxing Day which is when we will be finalising our teams based on this information.

When we are building our teams, we do need to be wary of not getting too involved in the short term and the fixtures (this is a reminder also to myself) since we are building our squads for 10-15 Gameweeks (hopefully) and do need to keep the big picture and ‘good teams, good players’ concept in our mind. Team structure and making sure we don’t ‘snooker ourselves’ out of certain players is important here.

That’s it from me for this week. We talk about team structure and a lot of big decisions on a special FPL Reboot edition of The FPL Wire which you can view below. I’m confident they’ll get your FPL juices flowing!