Fantasy FPL Fixtures – the first 6 weeks
Welcome back! The good people at FPL towers teased us a little yesterday by releasing a player list and they did not disappoint by then launching the game we love in it’s entirety a few hours later. And so we have about a month to pick, re-pick, swear, curse and laugh at our at our teams until the deadline. Having seen many a gallant attempt at a feasible team yesterday we felt that the main thing missing, and the one thing that would be of the most immediate help to managers, was a quick fixtures overview for the first few weeks. As ever we are happy to oblige and so here is how the land lies for the initial 6 GW’s and our take on who has a favorable start and who may find life rough to begin with…
Let’s begin with the tracker itself…
We have colour coded the fixtures in a simple fashion to allow you to judge your transfer and team selection plans accordingly:
[highlight_green]Green[/highlight_green] – We deem these to be winnable fixtures for the given team and should, in theory at least (!), harvest good fantasy points for you in the opening games. Aim to have a good nucleus of these players in your initial squad.
[highlight_yellow]Yellow[/highlight_yellow] – These are the fixtures that could go either way and do not stand out as being either particularly good or poor. If you have a player from a team in this category then do not be afraid to play them but take a considered view that it may not be an explosive week for them.
[highlight_red]Red[/highlight_red]- These are the teams that we consider to have a difficult fixture and as such may be best avoided from a fantasy perspective. Aim to minimise any players that have a run of reds in the opening games.
FAVOURABLE
Chelsea
Any established Premier League team that starts the campaign against two newly promoted teams has to be deemed to have a good chance of getting off the mark well but given Chelsea’s pedigree allied to some fantastic summer business with the purchases of Costa, Fabregras and Filipe we feel that Chelsea investment will be near vital given their opening fixtures. They face a couple of toughies in GW’s 3 and 5 with trips to Everton and City but the other four are definitely winnable as they face Burnley, Leicester, Swansea and Villa.
Manchester United
David Moyes had a right moan about United’s opening fixtures last season. We don’t expect you will be hearing such nonsense from Van Gaal this time around though for two reasons – he’s too smart to give the players any excuses and quite frankly their start is glorious! They begin with Swansea at home and then travel to Sunderland and that’s about as tough as it gets in the first six as they then have all three newly promoted sides back to back and end the sequence with a home game against West Ham. If LVG had hand picked his start he couldn’t have done it any better himself.
UNFAVOURABLE
Aston Villa
To be fair Villa’s first three games aren’t all too bad facing Stoke, Newcastle and Hull and it would be hard to pick a winner from all of those but it is GW’s 4 to 6 that worry us. Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea on the bounce smacks of zero points in that period.
Leicester
New boys Leicester are actually the bookies favourites to go straight back down and their opening schedule will do nothing to help them in that respect. Everton, Chelsea, Arsenal and Man Utd in the first six will probably see them languishing at the foot of the table come the end of August we feel.
There’s plenty to ponder given the fixtures so be sure to post your teams and your comments below as ever as we build toward the first game.
Thanks for reading Fantasy FPL Fixtures – the first 6 weeks – This article was written by Inittowinit
Well done Init!
7.1% of teams currently have Nani…Cookie, is there something in LVG’s bag I’m unaware of? Now that I can field Man U players I’ve got homework to do 😉
Morning ATF, I suspect they are just teams which have been autocompleted for now mate and have included him. I can pretty much guarantee that number will be more like 0.71% in a couple of weeks. Unless, of course, the magic man can weave his magic rod on Nanny.
This is big chat that he will actually be sold, with Juve and Milan rumoured to be interested for some reason – now LVG is at the club I would expect the transfer activity to speed up.
Before then and also in front of their impending US tour, it’s tough to work out where the value is or indeed who is worth looking at, but of the current crop I would suggest keeping a brief on:
De Gea
Shaw (assuming Evra does go)
Januzaj
Mata
Rooney
RvP
I’m not ruling others out (Herrera, Rafael, Valencia etc), but I would want to see more pre-season action before seriously considering others.
Hope that helps for now mate.
Just a quick question. Why do you have Everton against Liverpool Red, but Liverpool against Everton yellow?. Shouldn’t they both be same colour
.
Ant,
I knew someone would pick up on that. Let me answer that, bearing in mind I coloured the fixtures. It’s always a tough one at this stage of pre-season judging what is an easy/tough fixture.
In this case, I determined that although it’s not necessarily an easy game for Liverpool at the same time, it would probably viewed as a tough one for Everton….ie would you consider it a match where you would want/need Everton exposure? Probably not.
Hope that makes sense. Your point is extremely valid – but I hope I have answered it adequately!
Yeah I get your point. Liverpool could easily slip, but it’s a tough game for Everton.
Top work Init…it’s great to have a reference point like this for the early season fixtures and thanks for getting it done so quickly.
Cheers! :beer: This is really helpful. Fortunately Krul covers Schmeichel’s bad games pretty well so they still rotate! That’s about the only position I have sorted so far…
Good point James, it would be good to see some analysis on teams who rotate well, particularly in defence.
That would make for an excellent article init.
I meant by you lot!
Hahaha.
West Ham/Southampton rotation worked a treat for me last season. Doesn’t look too bad this season either.
Let’s compromise… we can team up 😉 haha I’ll look into it
Oh, in MLS this week I put Feilhaber in… not quite sure when my luck will run out! 😉
I’ve been waiting for it to update for hours now. It froze about an hour into the LA game. Keane absolutely bossed it! 2 goals & 2 assists.
Thanks everyone, hope it’s of some use, felt it was necessary for reference at least as people are having their first attempts at building their squads. Interesting to see if it changes people’s minds on a few choices today.
Oh well here it all begins agains…I think I will just say thank you now to everybody involved so as to not flood all my next posts with thank yous!!!
Great work…..can’t wait…excited….jizzed in my….woopsies that went to far!
Now let us see some pre season action to be able to judge some of the teams…Liverpool loosing 2-1 to Brøndby yesterday…what can we learn from that…absolutely nothing considering only 4 regulars played 45 minutes only!
Another question comes to mind: Will YYT continue his form from last year…surely he can NOT..can he??? haha
Also: Man City 0 – 2 Dundee
This pre season business is really a tease. You can’t really judge a team based on friendly results and all. I won’t (I hope) won’t be tricked again into fielding 4 non starters in my starting 11 like last year…(thank you Zaha n Lukaku amongst others haha)