Kev from Canada’s 19 gameweek FPL captain selection plan

Contributors, Fantasy Premier League

Here’s new FFGeek contributor Kev from Canada with his article on his 19 gameweek FPL captain selection plan.Kev finished with an overall rank of 6k last season.

Kev from Canada’s 19 gameweek FPL captain selection plan

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I have noticed that a lot of the chatter in the FFGeek Slack channel has been around building a first draft team and what the templates will look like come Game Week 1. There seem to be 3 different templates emerging in general:

5 at the Back,

3 budget Strikers,

1 designated Captain and a balanced squad

One of the things that helps me build my squad is to get an understanding of who you are going to be captaining in each of the first few weeks.  That helps to ensure you won’t get hurt too much in the rankings as you identify the maximum future optimum captain choices.  This exercise may also help point you in the direction of which of the possible templates above suits you best.

The schedule explained

There’s a link below and a graphic of my captain schedule

A few things to note:

The potential captains in scope

1. the captains I have selected were based on the ‘TOP 4 selections in each game week’s polls on the GEEK website last season’: Yes I went into each article and typed every top four name down. This site has ‘geek’ in the name for a reason. There are 19 names on the list.

19 Names: Salah, Aguero, Sterling, Mane, Pogba, Aubamayang, Lacazette, Jiminez, Son, Kane, Vardy, Felipe Anderson, Rashford, Sane, Richarlison, Trippier, Alonso, Mendy, Sanchez (week 1 pick lol).

I removed a number of the names that are extremely likely not to be a captain pick, just to save us all some time. Add them yourself if you feel otherwise. It would take two minutes.

Sigurdsson was added to that list. He is not a main Captain option per se, however, I thought it would be useful to see how Siggy’s captainable matches fit with Salah as Everton and Liverpool rotate perfectly home and away.  This is for scenarios for example when Salah plays MCI and your other designated  captain is a MCI player.

The red, green, blank and bolded matches explained

These are slightly different than the FPL site interpretation:

RED opponents (you would rather never captain against them): Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham, Everton, any traditionally tough rival game

Blank opponents (maybe you captain if form is blazing hot): Arsenal, Manchester United, Wolves/Watford away match

Green opponents (potential chance of being top captain choice that week): everyone else bar the bolded captains

Bolded: Norwich, Sheffield United, Aston Villa, Newcastle

A couple of notes.  I’ve added Newcastle to the bold list as with Rafa gone Newcastle’s prospects look bleak and maybe getting bleaker.  At the moment I would target a captain against them,  despite their good defensive performance last season.

Everton are an elite defence in my view and deserve the difficult red rating.  That’s unless they lose Gueye and/or Zouma.  If that happens I would probably go so far as moving them to a green opponent to be honest.

You may not agree with the colour ratings but the fixtures are plain to see if you want to have a different interpretation

What are we trying to work out?

So the main focus of this spreadsheet are to determine the answers to a few questions. Let’s see if we can do that:

How many captains do I need?

The realistic options that you have are probably between 1-3 premium’s and then some of the fringe captains (Siggy, Richarlison, Pogba, Rashford, etc.)

a. One Premium?

The focus here would be to have a balanced team to have flexibility. I could see this being popular when people realise how difficult it would be to full team of good players after they paid the prices of Salah, Aguero and KDB together and then realise they need to start clipping coupons to go shopping for defence and other attackers.

In my mind one premium is actually feasible. Salah would be the main man and his only real challenges in the first 12 weeks are GW6 (che), GW10 (TOT), GW 12 (MCI). If you are going balanced then you pretty much are going to have Siggy in there as he compliments those difficult fixtures well. In those weeks above Sigurdsson has GW 6 SHU, GW 10 (bha), and GW 12 (sou) which are all OK captain fixtures to pick.

Pogba or Rashford could also add a Norwich captain choice in GW10 to enhance your options too.

The single premium captain option is something to tinker with but the squad would be well rounded with players that can average over 5pts per 90 minutes and options at secondary captain.

b. Two premiums?

Which two? Question 2 below discusses this in more detail. Most of the templates seem to have 2 and a really strong defence with 5 or 6 total attackers. So this is the main option managers seem to be choosing.

c. Three premiums?

Everyone’s dream really. In this scenario you have to really label KDB as a premium. Salah, Kane and Sterling for example is just is not feasible. Not only would your team suck but you just don’t need three captain choices. The only way I would justify this is if you try to maximise the bolded fixtures, starting with KDB first and working backwards. One scenario could be KDB, Kane and Salah. This would lead you with 8 bolded captain fixtures through the first 14 gameweeks. Not bad.

Which 2 captains pair best?

There are two things to look for.

1. how do I avoid red bad fixtures and

2. how do I maximise the bolded fixtures.

Play around as you like. I plan on wildcarding in gameweek 4 as it stands now so I am really looking at a short time line and will use this again when I wild card. Here are some notes:

First 4 weeks most bolded pairs:

Kane has 2 and Salah/Auba have 1, however the 1 is the same GW as one of Kane’s 2. So really the most you can get here is 2 and I think it makes Kane look more attractive than other premiums if you are targeting the early wildcard. Of course that means you have no Man City, and even though they are not bolded, you could argue every Man City green match should be bolded.

First 8 weeks most bolded pairs:

Salah/Kane
Salah/Auba

First 14 weeks most bolded pairs:

Salah/Kane – they play each other in gw10, maybe swap Kane to Auba then for his run of green fixtures and Norwich match.
Salah/Auba
Salah/Aguero

The trend is really Salah is a must to start the season. Not really ground breaking news there.

Summary

I think the best way to use this info and the schedule is one of two ways:

1. how many premiums do I think I need
2. how can I efficiently implement a premium transfer plan if I have luxury transfers in the future

Good luck. I hope this table proves useful.



Here’s a link to the excel spreadsheet and a graphic below

Captain Favourites first 19 weeks

Get additional content in the form of Podcasts, an interactive transfer and points prediction tool, 4 £50 prize leagues for the first 160 joiners and a Slack channel for discussion with members and contributors in our Patreon site.  The first $3 monthly payment gets you in the prize leagues and Slack channel for the season.

Other articles

See also interviews with Rick PorterKev from Canada and Andrew Whitfield

There’s also FFGeek contributor draft teams part 1 and part 2

FFGeek FPL league code

Here’s our FPL league code:

fnqq66

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