My FPL Gameweek 1 Team is locked. There is no going back now.
I've entered FPL again.
Which is slightly strange when you consider that most of my football brain these days is occupied by women's football, Football Manager and trying to remember when the next WSL fixture is.
The Premier League hasn't exactly disappeared from my life. I still know the big clubs, the obvious players and can usually work out roughly who is supposed to be good.
But I'm not spending every weekend studying Premier League matches or checking which midfielder has taken three more touches in the final third than someone else.
I barely follow the Premier League anymore.
Naturally, this seemed like the perfect time to build an FPL team and start writing about it.
So, what's the plan?
There isn't really one.
I'm winging this.
I looked at last season's points, goals, assists, minutes, prices and fixtures. Then I picked the players who made the most sense to me and tried not to change my mind every five minutes.
Sometimes there was a proper reason. Sometimes I liked the price. Occasionally, I just liked the name.
That is the level of expert analysis we're working with here.
Stats. Prices. Fixtures. And vibes, apparently.
Goalkeepers
This was probably the easiest part of the squad.
I wanted two goalkeepers who actually play. A wild concept, apparently.
David Raya
Raya was one of the easiest picks in the whole squad. He got 19 clean sheets last season and starts Gameweek 1 at home to Coventry. Even I couldn't overthink that one.
Caoimhín Kelleher
Kelleher was £1m cheaper than Raya and still managed 143 points. The 109 saves also caught my eye. If the defence gives him plenty to do, at least he can get points for being busy.
Defenders
Defence is probably the least exciting part of the squad, which is exactly how I wanted it.
I wasn't trying to find five players who would make me look clever. I wanted clean sheets, minutes and the occasional goal or assist if they were feeling generous.
Gabriel
Gabriel was expensive, but 209 points is a very good way of getting my attention. Arsenal also have Coventry at home in Gameweek 1, so apparently my strategy is simply owning as many Arsenal players as possible.
James Tarkowski
Tarkowski started 37 matches and scored 170 points. For £6m, that felt like a solid pick. There is probably a much deeper explanation available, but I chose to stop researching when the numbers looked nice.
Virgil van Dijk
Van Dijk played every week, scored six goals and finished on 175 points. That's basically the entire argument. I saw a reliable defender who occasionally remembers he's very tall at corners and clicked buy.
Marc Guéhi
Guéhi was one of the picks I spent a bit more time thinking about. 179 points for £6m looked pretty good to me. That's honestly the level of analysis we're working with here.
Marcos Senesi
Senesi wasn't the most obvious name I looked at, which is probably why I ended up liking the pick. 175 points, 14 clean sheets and six assists felt like a decent amount of return for £6m. I may have found a bargain. Or I may have simply clicked on a player with a nice stat line.
Midfielders
This is where the squad started to feel less like a plan and more like a collection of decisions that I now have to defend.
There were plenty of midfielders I liked. There were also plenty of players that seemed like very obvious picks.
Naturally, I ignored some of them.
Antoine Semenyo
Semenyo scored 202 points last season, including 17 goals. At that point, the research was mostly done for me. Hopefully the Gameweek 1 fixture doesn't immediately make me regret everything.
Declan Rice
Rice got 184 points and costs £7.5m. He's also another Arsenal player facing Coventry at home. At this point, I'm beginning to suspect I may have accidentally built my entire Gameweek 1 strategy around one fixture.
Elliot Anderson
Anderson got 180 points last season for a player priced at £6.5m. He started every match too, which I quite like because players who actually play tend to be more useful than the ones sitting on the bench.
Harry Wilson
Ten goals and nine assists for £6.5m looked pretty good to me. I don't have a complicated tactical reason beyond that. Sometimes you see 19 goal involvements and decide that's enough research for one evening.
Enzo Le Fée
Right. Full honesty? I liked his name. The 147 points, five goals and six assists helped, obviously. But if we're being completely serious, "Enzo Le Fée" definitely got him onto the shortlist before the spreadsheet did.
Forwards
This is probably where the squad starts looking questionable.
Haaland scored 239 points last season. He costs £15.5m.
I looked at all that information and decided not to pick him.
Haaland doesn't play until Sunday, so at least I have a couple of days before finding out whether this was a terrible idea.
No Haaland.
This could either look like a clever way of spreading the budget around or the worst decision I've made all season. There will probably be a clearer answer by Sunday evening.
Igor Thiago
Twenty-two goals. That's the reason. I could probably write another paragraph, but 22 is doing most of the talking here.
João Pedro
João Pedro got 177 points, scored 15 goals and added nine assists. For £7.5m, that felt like a good way to spread the money around instead of putting half the budget into one extremely large Norwegian.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin
Calvert-Lewin is the value pick. £6m for someone who scored 14 goals last season felt worth the gamble. The slightly weird part is that he's playing for Leeds and I'm a Wednesday fan, so this already feels like a questionable life choice. FPL clearly makes you do strange things.
£21.5m. Three forwards for £6m more than Haaland.
That's the theory, anyway.
Spread the money around. Have more players capable of scoring points. Don't rely on one player costing £15.5m.
Ask me again on Sunday.
The big names I rejected
Some players were very difficult to leave out.
Others were easier to ignore because the budget had already disappeared and I was pretending that was part of the strategy.
Bruno Fernandes
235 points last season. Leaving him out feels brave. Or stupid. Time will tell.
Bukayo Saka
Arsenal at home to Coventry. I already own three Arsenal players, and apparently that was where I had to stop.
Erling Haaland
239 points. £15.5m. Not in my team. I have said enough.
Morgan Gibbs-White
188 points and one of the players I liked most. Still somehow missed out.
Ollie Watkins
A very sensible option. Unfortunately, I had already fallen for Thiago, João Pedro and DCL.
Viktor Gyökeres
Plenty of potential. I went with my other forwards instead, which is a sentence I may regret.
Phil Foden
£7m for Foden was tempting. I still looked elsewhere.
Cole Palmer
This could age horribly.
So... this is the team
After all the changes, second-guessing and staring at player prices for far longer than any normal person should, this is where I ended up.
Every. Last. Penny.
Gameweek 1
The deadline has passed.
Which is actually quite nice because I can no longer make another transfer, change my captain six times or suddenly decide that a completely different player is essential.
The team is locked. Whatever happens now is officially somebody else's fault. Probably Haaland's.
Am I actually going to keep doing this?
Honestly, I quite like the idea of turning this into a little series.
Not as an expert FPL guide. There are already plenty of people who actually know what they're doing for that.
This is more going to be me figuring things out as I go.
I'll look back at each Gameweek, see who returned, see who blanked, work out which transfers were sensible and laugh at the ones that clearly weren't.
There will probably be some good decisions. There will definitely be some terrible ones.
Haaland also plays on Sunday, so I won't have to wait long to find out whether leaving him out was genius or complete nonsense.
I am not an FPL expert. I'm just winging it.
And maybe that's the fun of it.
No pretending that every decision comes from some advanced model. No acting like I can predict exactly what will happen.
I've picked 15 players, spent exactly £100m and now I'm going to see what happens.
Hopefully, I still remember I have a team in a month's time.
For now, though, the squad is locked.