Our team of Hall of Famers and guest writers provide Fantasy Premier League (FPL) tips and advice throughout the season. Here, two-time Indian FPL champion Lateriser picks out an Arsenal player who has caught his eye, looks at the impact of AFCON/the Asian Cup and reveals his Gameweek 17 transfer.
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The Gameweeks are coming thick and fast and we Fantasy Premier League (FPL) managers have to make swift, quick decisions.
In this article, I want to just generally talk about important pointers to soak in while making your decisions – and a player who has caught my eye of late.
ODEGAARD IMPROVEMENT
That player is Martin Ødegaard (£8.4m). For someone who had 23 returns last season, Odegaard’s start to the season has been relatively underwhelming. He seemed to have some injury issues at the start of the campaign because he simply didn’t look like the same player from 2022/23 who took the league by storm and seemed to be playing within himself.
This has changed since his return in Gameweek 13. He looks very predatory on the eye and in a market where we’re soon going to be hunting for Son Heung-min (£9.7m) and Mohamed Salah (£13.2m) replacements, as they both depart to represent their nations in the Asian Cup and Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) respectively, Odegaard is going to emerge as an option very soon.
The improvement is replicated in the numbers, as you can see below:
Above: Martin Odegaard’s Gameweek-by-Gameweek expected goal involvement (xGI) breakdown
Odegaard didn’t cross 0.5 non-penalty xGI in any of the games before his vague injury but he has surpassed that threshold in each of his last three matches. He’s someone who generally overperforms his expected data anyway. In the games where Kai Havertz (£7.1m) has featured, the German seems to make the decoy run and the ball seems to find Odegaard in the centre of the box.
He’s currently only owned by 14.7% of the game and could potentially get a Christmas present (pen-sent) from Bukayo Saka (£9.0m).
Arsenal, with Gabriel Jesus (£7.9m) and Odegaard in full flow, are beginning to play some really good football. Their fixtures are really strong as well in the long term and they are one of the teams not really affected by the AFCON/Asian Cup departees.
ONE EYE ON AFCON/ASIAN CUP
Speaking of AFCON and Asia Cup departees, Tottenham Hotspur are one of the teams significantly affected.
Not only do they have James Maddison (£7.8m) and Micky van de Ven (£4.4m) injured (they could be back just around the time Son and company depart) but they will also be losing Pape Matar Sarr (£4.5m), Yves Bissouma (£5.0m) and Son to international tournaments in January.
This image above from @robtfpl is a great depiction of what to expect. Most of the players are departing after their Gameweek 20 fixtures and based on how far their teams go, they will make their returns between Gameweeks 23 and 26.
Son and Salah are both parts of fairly strong national sides, so we do expect their countries to go far, but in terms of how we set up our FPL team structures, we need to be very careful of spreading the cash so much that it becomes difficult or impossible to get two of the best three picks in the game once they return from their international commitments.
Very soon, we are going to have a lot of money flying with these two departing. One piece of advice I want to give FPL managers, and especially Wildcarders, is that we need to be very wary of price bias. Just because we have so much money lying around, we don’t necessarily have to use it. We need to look at picks objectively for how good they are, irrespective of their price, so that you don’t miss out on some genuinely good options like Richarlison (£6.6m) just because you decided to go for a more expensive pick with all that loose change.
That and spreading the cash too much are things we particularly need to be mindful of when these players finally depart.
GAMEWEEK 17 TRANSFER PLANS
With my own team, I corrected the huge error I made in buying Reece James (£5.4m) three weeks ago. I sold him for Pedro Porro (£5.4m) on Sunday. I wanted to do it before I got sucked into him ‘being touch and go’ for Sheffield United but, as it happens, news later emerged that he is potentially going to be out for three months.
I need to put my hand up and say it was a terrible move and it was a lesson to myself. A lot of people rightly pointed out to me that James was a nostalgia pick, and I have to agree with that. When a player is so hampered by injuries, I feel like we need to give him a few weeks of consistent 90 minutes before jumping on him.
Not only that but buying a player like him in a festive fixture crunch made the move worse and it just feels right to acknowledge that it was poor FPL management from my end. I definitely need to learn from that.
NEWCASTLE TO BOUNCE BACK?
One last thing I want to talk about is Newcastle United. While they’ve been on a relatively poor run of late, especially defensively, I feel like this could be a case of ‘buy low’.
They are now free from European distraction and have a few of their important players either returning or not far away from making comebacks. Outside of their fixtures in Gameweeks 20-22, they have a generally good run of matches. I wouldn’t worry too much if you’ve held onto their assets for a long time because I feel like their defensive fortunes are about to turn.
That is all from me this week.
We did an elaborate pod for The FPL Wire this week where my fellow Pro Pundit Pras made a flow chart for what to do with Erling Haaland (£14.0m), based on the news we get, and we also discussed Wildcard drafts.
You can view the same below:
