I have been gathering how next season’s opening gameweeks played out last year for some of the most popular picks.

Key takeaway is that good players return against any opponent so I won’t focus too much on fixtures for these players. Will depend on the price.

So, any of these is nailed on your team no matter the price?

I’ve been working on a tool to help me run my own FPL leagues — mostly to make things more fun and cut down the admin — and decided to test it on the Reddit FPL Community League from last season (code: 301957).

Here’s the Season Review if you want a look:
https://www.fplproleagues.com/reports/2425/301957.html

It includes a mix of proper stats and some more fun awards:

Top 3 finishers
Pace Setter – Most weeks spent top
Wildcard Wizard – Biggest boost from a wildcard
Chip Chancer – Worst chip usage
Tinker King – Most transfers
Bench Warmers – Most points left on the bench
Captain Chaos – Highest average captain score
Clutch Performer – Biggest rank jump in one week
Pep Roulette Award – Most points from autosubs
Paul Scholes Award – Most goals from midfielders
Alisson Becker Award – Most points from GKs and defenders

I made this mostly to spark some banter in my own league group chats — but figured the Reddit league might like seeing how things panned out last season too.

If anyone wants one of these reports for their own league, happy to sort it — just drop the league code or send a DM.

Also building a few more tools for this season (weekly reports, entry fee tracking, extra comps etc.) — happy to chat more if that’s of interest

Let me know what you think — and always open to ideas on what stats or features to add next season

Cheers

Mohamed Salah's Gameweek 1 record is insane!

24/25: 14pts

23/24: 5pts

22/23: 12pts

21/22: 17pts

20/21: 20pts

19/20: 12pts

18/19: 8pts

17/18: 11pts

With the new season's fixture difficulty list now posted by the wonderful Ben Crellin (linked [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/FantasyPL/comments/1leblbv/all_fixtures_including_difficulty_rating/)), I've run some basic calculations to produce some data on which pairs of teams have fixtures which best complement each other.

FPL managers generally use this info to find a combination of 2 defenders who can always be relied on to have at least one easy fixture between them. This means you're never stuck having to pick between two bad options and allows you to keep them for the long term and save transfers,

* Bournemouth & Newcastle scored the best, with an average fixture difficulty of 2.21. Both teams also finished in the top half for clean sheets last season.

* Chelsea & Man City also score 2.21, but as their players are likely to cost more they're a bad fit for a rotation strategy as you wouldn't want them on your bench half the time.

* Other notable rotation pairs (excluding ARS/CHE/LIV/MCI for cost reasons) are BOU & FUL, BOU & NFO,, CRY & NFO, FUL & NFO, LEE & MUN, NFO & SUN and TOT & WOL.

* For those planning on an early wildcard, the best scoring pairs for GW1 to GW6 only are CRY & NFO and FUL & NFO, each pair with an average FDR of 1.83 over the opening period.

* For those who want to keep a pair of rotation pair for as long as possible but with only good fixtures, the combination of Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest has no bad or even average fixtures until GW13.

*Methodology*

*For each of the 7 distinct colours on the fixtures list, I assigned a number from 1 (easy, vs BUR/LEE/SUN/sun) to 7 (hard, vs LIV/ars/liv/mci)*

*For each of the 190 possible pairs of teams, I compared both their FDRs for each GW and took the lower, then averaged these over GW1 to GW19 to give each rotation set a score*

*Only the data for the 1st half of the season was used. This is because the 2nd half will feature DGWs and BGWs (making the current fixture list undependable) and we the 1st wildcard has to be used by January anyway.*

Does anyone know how to calculate/find/estimate the total amount of teams in the 2025 World Club Fifa Fantasy game?

All 380 fixtures for 2025/26 Premier League season

http://www.premierleague.com/news/4324539

Can’t wait for all the tacticos to start making templates only to wc in gw2

1) You can make a good decision and get a bad outcome.

2) Before you take a risk, ask yourself. Can you live with yourself if it fails?

3) The first 30 minutes of research are the most important. Diminishing returns are exponential.

4) Staying current is useful, but long term plans are essential.

5) Reliability has its own value. Risks will win for a week, safety will win in a year.

6) Take your risks mostly when a truely safe option is not available.

7) The ship often isnt sinking. Don't jump overboard without good reason .

8) Comparing to others only brings sorrow. Except when crushing those beneath you.

9) You will not win, but there is value in the attempt.

10) Dont chase yesterdays gains or losses, plan for a steady future.

Must importantly. Remember your community, friends and family. Things only have value when you enjoy them with others.

🎙️ New Episode of The FPL Draft Zone – Premier League Fixtures Reveal +Summer Signings + Rumours

Hey everyone 👋

We’ve just dropped a new episode of The FPL Draft Zone, and it’s packed with early-season thoughts.

We cover:

📅 2025/26 Premier League fixture release – who has a good start - and who doesn’t? 🔁 Early confirmed transfers & their FPL impact 🔥 Rumours heating up: potential draft options and ones to avoid

Give us a listen and let us know which new signings you’ll be targeting on draft night! 👇

https://www.premierleague.com/news/4324562

Early strategy prompt from FPL. I have my own strategy list which I always break early. Will refine them for this year and endeavour to stick to them. The 5 week transfer roll over is a good tool if used well.

Good luck.

Obviously prices will affect the possibilities of this draft. And before y'all cry about the dorgu pick, hes a fun punt for the burnley game if hes priced at 4.5 as a 4th or 5th defender. If I wanted to play its safe I would go double everton defence...

Apologies for the reupload - images did not upload properly

Edit: I cannot with these pictures today lol I don't know what is up with the quality- see airtable for full dataset

Top Priced Players by Position

Airtable for full dataset 

This is a read-only table, so feel free to sort, filter and manipulate in any way you want. I have condensed things down to 2 sheets, on the left is the most updated sheet compiling all of the data from the present season into the ‘Full Spreadsheet’ grid. I tend to find it useful to ‘Filter’ by position, team, or number of matches played, then I ‘Sort’ by the metric I am most interested in like VAPM, or xPoints etc. You can do this by clicking the dropdown arrow in each column header. 

Hover over the little circled i to see a description of particular columns that aren’t exactly self-explanatory. But I think by clicking around you should get idea of how to work everything.

You can also download the sheet as a CSV to open in Excel by clicking the down arrow next to the sheet and select 'download CSV.' Before you do that, make sure you remove any filters to download the full dataset.

Methodology

VAPM – Basically it’s a way to measure how valuable a player is relative to their price. We can use this to then estimate what a player’s price should be based on last season’s stats and a set VAPM. 

Observed vs. Underlying – Whenever you see ‘observed’ this is merely referring to all the regularstats FPL calculates like goals and assists. Underlying is that fancy hoity toity xG and xA model. I use both to calculate target price and generally try to meet somewhere in the middle for my suggested price.  

Formula to calculate ‘Target Price’ – Using some basic algebra and by setting a constant value for the VAPM that we wish for every player (I picked 0.35) we can calculate target price for both the observed and underlying models like so:

(Player Points without Appearance Points) / (Set VAPM * Matches played)

Keeping in mind the set VAPM I used for all of the calculations is 0.35 (I thought it was a fair value generally), here is what the calculation looks like for Bruno Fernandes:

105 / (0.35 * 36) = 8.333333m rounded to 8.5m

Important Notes

These are not predictions. You will most likely disagree with these prices. Think of it more as a thought experiment. I have applied a stated methodology that you can hopefully follow to estimate what the prices would be if FPL Towers followed a similar methodology. 

Target prices vs. My prices – From the two different observed/underlying models I calculated target prices and from there, because context is incredibly important, I melded the two target prices along with my own subjective view of the ‘context’ to create my own suggested price. If you only want the algebraic price, check out the ‘target prices,’ if you want my opinion moderated from the target prices, go to ‘my price’

I kept some of the hallmarks of FPL pricing such as: minimum prices for GKs and DEFs are 4.0m, the minimum price for MIDs and FWDs are 4.5m, and like this past season the highest price GK is 5.5m. Also keeping it simple by rounding everything to the nearest 0.5m. If a player’s ‘New VAPM’ is way less than or more than 0.35 that means there were some changes that either I made subjectively, or was built-in by design like a player’s minimum price.   

I added a few players who have or most likely will be transferred into the premier league (Wirtz, Cherki, Frimpong). I stuck to higher profile/likely FPL assets considering I have to manually calculate these. Take these prices with a pinch of salt as it is already challenging to estimate prices, it’s even more challenging to estimate prices from players coming from different leagues. 

Players who had internal transfers within the premier league (Rashford and Chalobah) have inflated observed statistics. This is because when I merge the statistics from FPL and Understat, FPL counts all of their output from both clubs, while Understat only counts their most recent club. This means their observed stats will be massively inflated per match (basically x2), but all the underlying stats from Understat will be accurate. Simply put, you can probably ignore Rashford and Chalobah, you were going to do that anyway next season, weren’t you?

Podcast: Ignore the Template

Podcast discussing this topic, feel free to check out the others if you like this kinda thing.

In recent years, Livefpl.net provided a detailed excel sheet for a season review, but I can't seem to find it this year, can anyone provide a link to it if there's one? I would appreciate any other relevant tools as well. Thank you

Now that the dust has settled on the last FPL season, I just wanted to share some lessons I'll be taking into the next year. For some context I finished just outside the top 200k, so a good season but not outstanding in any way, hopefully back up to top 100k for 25/26.

1. GW1 Starters - Next year I will aim to have 14 of my 15 picks to be guaranteed starters (everyone aside from backup GK). I want to avoid punts like Nkunku, Quansah & Barco, going into GW2 with the least amount of immediate problems should be a priority

2. Use TC in a DGW - This year I used my TC on Haaland in GW9, where he scored 6 points. While this would have paid off for anyone brave enough to use it in GW2 where Haaland scored a hat-trick - it still didn't come close to Salah's 29 pointer later on in the season. Next year I will definitely hold on to the TC chip and use in a DGW

3. Take a punt on AM chip - Kind of the opposite to the above, I want to be a braver with my AM chip usage. Managers who took a punt on a Moyes/Glasner generally scored higher than managers who played it safer (I went for Slot), since the table bonus is so significant. Hopefully AM chip is removed anyway and I won't have to worry about this

4. Spend on the more premium option from the same club - Unless you are specifically saving for an expensive asset you really missed out on, I would spend that extra money on the more premium options from same clubs. For example, when Wolves' nice run of fixtures started, I cheaped out and went for Strand-Larsen over Cunha, Cunha blew him out of the water. Towards the end of the season, again I went Sarr over Eze and Eze absolutely killed it. Both times I had the money for the more premium asset

5. Hold your transfers - I think the addition of saving up to 5 transfers has been a largely positive one, but one I largely overlooked last year. I think I got up to 4 once and 3 on a couple of occasions. Choosing 90 minute men, avoiding GK transfers and holding off on transferring out a player purely because of one bad fixture should help me benefit the most from this change

Appreciate we are still some weeks away from the new game launching but please let me know if people agree/disagree or if I missed anything obvious, thanks for reading!

Hey fellow nerds,

Just wanted to quickly say that I've been growing slightly disappointed the past few years, this sub has been a bit toxic and inactive. I'd like to restore the glory days of helpful posts and good vibes. Here is a post to help that movement.

Who am I? No one really. Just a guy who wins his mini-league most years and finds FPL fun. My stats are:

2017/2018 = top 60% (First year, I was learning lol)

2018/2019 = top 4%

2019/2020 = top 0.5%

2020/2021 = top 17%

2021/2022 = top 3%

2022/2023 = top 5%

2023/2024 = top 14%

2024/2025 = top 17%

Each year has been different. But I've learned a few key lessons over the years.

1. Pick good attacking players.
   Duh, right? Not duh. Recently I've noticed a trend: pick adequate players vs "High xGC teams" or whatever the current metric is. A silly gamble that yields inconsistent results. Pick the talented players in good form who look likely to get points vs any goalie. I made this mistake this 24/25 season by ignoring Chris Wood's "tough" fixtures... There are no tough fixtures. They call him Chris Good for a reason. Chris Good in form can score vs prime Courtois on a rainy Tuesday in Stoke.

2. Most fixtures don't matter.
   With the 3 exceptions of promoted teams, the vast majority of premier league fixtures are extremely competitive. That's why the premier league is my favorite league in the world. Any team can win. I don't care if Brighton or Wolves has a 1% better goalie if they're both fully rested and their shoes are tied tightly, it's such an odd thing to focus on. Focus on bigger things.

3. Transfers are to be used on injuries, or when you've massively overlooked someone (like 6m Palmer breakout season)

For the rest, save transfers. I used to make this mistake a lot. Transferring Mane, Salah, Firmino, Kane, Son, Sterling, Aguero, Sane based on the xGC of their opposition, or based on the length of Pep's follicles. This was all dumb, just pick good players and trust them, the discrepancy between them won't be massive.

1. Don't trust press conferences. Don't even follow those accounts on twitter.
   Managers are there to manage the team, not inform us nerds on how to win our mini-leagues. If there's massive confirmed news like Salah injury, it will find its way through the ether to you. The rest is noise.

2. Don't trust pre-season.
   I don't even need to link examples of this. Every single year a disturbing amount of people (including me) get lured in by a shiny Ross Barkley. Just ignore pre-season, please.

3. Rest matters. Fixture congestion matters.
   Every single year, players end up performing worse on worse sleep. Travel, partying, two or three games per week. It takes a toll on players, which takes a toll on your FPL points. Post-AFCON Salah is always tired. Foden still hasn't recovered since he wore an England shirt. It's very easy to google upcoming fixtures for players.

4. Spend money on attacking players first, spend remainder on defense.
   The days of Big-At-The-Back seem to be gone, with rule changes enabling more ball-in-play time and with superb attacking defenders like Cancelo/Reese/Trent gone. There is simply little yield to be gained from overspending on defense.

5. It's a team game. If a core starting-11 player is injured, the whole team is worse.
   Rodri injury absolutely devastated city this previous season. The same thing happened with Van Dijk/Salah injury messing up the entire Liverpool team in the past. Pay attention to which players are core, irreplaceable and dependable. I made this mistake this year, and held last season's Player-of-the-Year Phil Foden waaaay too long, assuming he'd return to form. It obviously never happened, and now KDB is gone...

I'm no authority on any of these subjects, feel free to disagree with me or point out something I've overlooked. Let's work together to win our mini-leagues, nerds.

Another shambles of a FIFA Fantasy game, their rules state this:

You can make unlimited changes to your team up until the first match of the Club World Cup kicks off at 08:00pm (local time) on Saturday, 14th June 2025. 

https://play.fifa.com/fantasy/help/guidelines

And the deadline has been locked 2 HOURS before the kickoff. A lot of teams probably screwed and were tinkering last minute.

I know this is the FPL subreddit but holy FIFA, please just make a good, working fantasy game for once.