Here’s our FPL team tips article with 3 FFGeek Contributors and their early draft teams. There’s Rob Reid, Avishek Majumdar and Joseph Crilley with his personal team. Between them they have only finished outside the top 1% of teams 3 times in the last 5 seasons
FPL Team Tips – 3 FFGeek Contributors early Draft teams
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Rob Reid
Rob’s last 7 seasons overall ranks were 66k, 12k, 148k, 94k, 22k, 4k and 7k
Follow Rob on twitter here
Hi everyone – hope you’re all ok and are enjoying the summer break. Speaking personally, I’ve been enjoying the time away from FPL. It’s given me a chance to get out into the hills with the dogs and I’m joined quite frequently now by my children who seem to have inherited their Dad’s love for the outdoors. I’ve also been enjoying watching things other than football on the TV . I’ve worked my way through a couple of boxsets, the summer rugby internationals are currently in full flow and it’s also been nice to see the England cricket team making an entertaining resurgence at Test Level. As July ticks over though, that little niggle in me that craves the Premier League again is just waiting to be itched and I was definitely ready for the FPL launch this week and was pretty excited to see what the game holds for 2022-23, a season that promises to be unique again.
With regards to my contributions for Fantasy Football Geek this season, first of all it’s nice to be back for 2022/23 and thank you to Geek for inviting me along again for another campaign. As per Geek’s post last week, most of my team articles this season will be accessible through our Patreon wide forward tier sign-up – this will include my final team each week, but will also include live transfers that I make – posted as I make them.
I know this does limit access for some, but the Patreon subscription fee I believe is extremely modest, with no lengthy commitment involved and is necessary so that Geek can continue to provide such a good platform for offering helpful and insightful Fantasy Football content to you all. Don’t forget also that the Patreon subscription also comes with access to Joe’s excellent Transfer Planner (the results of which speak for themselves with a 3k OR FPL team run by it last season) as well as access to our Slack Forum, giving you an opportunity to engage with other like-minded managers and also some of the contributor team.
I will however this season be providing an ‘Early Thoughts’ article for my team which at present we aim to post outside of the Patreon content on the open section of the site. I will aim to do this most gameweeks (the exception possibly being where there is a short turnaround to a midweek gameweek) and this will offer a review of how my team is doing and some initial ideas about how I’m planning to set-up and change my team over the next few gameweeks. And although my final team now won’t be on Twitter until after the deadline, you are still more than welcome to engage with me on there.
Onto 2022-23 then – let’s get this show on the road.
2022-23 Launch Musings
Prices
Pricing looks very competitive to me this year and I think is aimed to keep the game accessible for all levels of player, be you a committed fanatic or a more causal manager. Starting at the top end of the budget, there are 5 standout premium players (Salah, De Bruyne, Son, Haaland and Kane) and another potential breakout premium (Bruno Fernandes) also of immediate interest. The £8-10m price point also has some nice options. This is especially true in midfield with the likes of Saka, Diaz, Kulusevski, Foden and Mahrez all tempting while in the forwards section Jesus is keenly priced too.
£5.5-8m is a price point that definitely favours defenders with last season’s attacking full-backs all fairly accessible. There’s less to get excited about in midfield at the higher end of this range though there are some interesting £5.5 options that could be helpful fillers, while there are a few forward options who could be considered too mainly from £6.5-7.5m. The budget price point of £4.5-5.0 definitely favours the defence and there are pretty much no obvious enticing midfield or forward options here as yet, while the uber-cheap £4.0m defensive bracket doesn’t promise much yet either though it is possible that an option may emerge as pre-season progresses.
Game changes and possible strategies
The other standout feature for me is the way the World Cup break is going to be handled – unlimited transfers over the recess, like during the Covid break of 2020. This effectively amounts to another 1st half of the season Wildcard. Looking at how this effects the game, for me it effectively breaks it up into 4 chunks or mini-seasons if you like. GW1-8 would be the first fixture set with the International Break falling at the end of this. Initially, GW9 looks a natural and I suspect popular spot to play the first Wildcard, which has to be used before the World Cup. This gives you GW9-16 with your Wildcard 1 team. The World Cup then effectively forms another Wildcard with GW16-28 looking like the stretch for this team with the major blank gameweek falling around the end of this period. Teams could then be dead-ended with the 2nd Wildcard played then to attack the double gameweeks which fall in the season run-in.
I suspect most template teams will broadly follow this sort of strategy, but it does also give opportunity for divergence. I think this particularly applies in the first few weeks of the season and can be looked at in a couple of ways. It’s generally considered a good strategy to start out with a fairly low-risk team in GW1 which covers most price points and then flex your team around to hop onto any flashes of good form – this looks even more viable with the 1st Wildcard an effective buffer here. However, the alternative to this is to start very high risk and try and get off to a flyer as you can always fall back on the Wildcard after 2-3 weeks if this isn’t working and move onto what looks like a more effective set-up.
Setting up my team and a First Draft
As for me, I think I’ll probably still favour my usual strategy of trying to set up fairly balanced team for GW1 which tries to marry up covering the main Captaincy options for the first few weeks, respects Effective Ownership so as not to cede too much ground to the general pack and also gives me the flexibility of being able cover the main price points in each position. This latter point is important as it means you’re less likely to have to burn your early transfers or take points hits to bring in any players who start the season well but aren’t in my squad.
Fixture ease is also important over these first few weeks and my GW1 squad will also try to have players who have good fixture runs for the first ‘mini-season’ – GWs 1-8. I’m going to cover my thoughts on fixtures in a separate piece which also looks at the prospects for each team so I won’t go into too much detail on that here.
As for my first draft, here’s what I’ve got initially.
Salah and Haaland are my 2 premiums. I’ve gone for Kulusevski in the £8m price point initially – I think it’s important to cover this price bracket and he also has a good GW1 fixture which hopefully will give some cover to Son and Kane who are both also good Captain options for GW1. I’ve invested heavily in defence as I prefer the £6-7m options here to the midfield alternatives, so there’s Ederson for his gametime security in the City defence and 4 attacking wing-backs. Tomiyasu covers Arsenal’s good fixture start, though I’ll be keeping an eye on their pre-season set-up – they do have some value in the £6m bracket in midfield but there is a lot of competition for places.
I am concerned on this draft about the other 3 midfield slots – having two £5.5m players and a bench fodder £4.5m player isn’t ideal and affords slightly less flexibility. I’m fairly comfortable with Wissa as a rotatable £5.5m asset after he finished last season well, Neto tends to promise a lot though without really delivering and we’ll need to watch pre-season to see if a viable £4.5m playing option emerges – if Andreas Pereira does move to Fulham he could be viable. Up front, I like Wilson for the first couple of gameweeks at least and he could easily be moved to Toney in GW3, or simply held through Newcastle’s trickier GW3-5 period. The 3rd striker spot is £4.5m bench fodder Greenwood.
What I can say for sure is that this is very unlikely to be the team that starts GW for me. There are some players who I suspect won’t leave my drafts now – we’ll see!
Aims for Season 2022/23
2021/22 was a topsy-turvy campaign for me. I stuttered through a fair chunk of it, struggling as many did to navigate the tricky winter period with all the Covid cancellations before finding some momentum in March and April. 66k in the end was a slightly underwhelming finish, but it could have been far worse.
My aims for 22/23 are therefore similar to 21/22
Win my main friends and family mini-league
Top 50k finish
Top half finish in the Contributors’ League
That’s it then for my first article of 2022/23. I’ll be doing some team analysis next, so keep an eye out for this over the next few days.
Avishek Majumdar
Avishek’s last 5 seasons ORs were 62k, 32k, 13k, 45k and 64k
Here’s my first draft. The bench are just placeholders
Also £1m still up my sleeve.
Joseph Crilley
Joe’s last 6 seasons overall ranks were 5k, 93k, 68k 28k 7k and 13k
This is Joe’s personal team and not to be confused with the Transfer Planner Team. Joe’s personal team including commentary, live transfer alerts and the final team lineup will be available only on the wide forward tier of the FFGeek Patreon site. You can access his first draft team article there.
Other Posts
Improvements for the 22/23 season
The FFGeek Fixture Ease Schedule
Assessing the 3 Promoted Teams
New Player Profiles – Haaland and Nunez
New Player Profiles – Vieira, Awoniyi and Botman
The FPL site is open plus a first draft FFGeek team
4 FFGeek Contributors First Draft Teams
New FFGeek Contributor Pete Allaway
2 more FFGeek Contributor Teams
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