FPL Gameweek 1 Review & Gameweek 2 Team Reveal: Apparently, I’m Being Patient

Well. That escalated quickly.

One Gameweek into my attempt to get back into FPL and I've already got a player I rejected scoring 13 points, my bench goalkeeper outscoring my starter and one of my £8m forwards somehow managing zero points despite having 1.08 xGI.

So yes. I'm doing great.

The important thing to remember here is that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I'm not an FPL expert, I'm not secretly sitting on years of fantasy football knowledge and I don't spend every weekend watching six Premier League matches while studying every move.

The whole reason I started this was to see whether I could actually stick with FPL for once. I've started it plenty of times before, got really into it and then completely lost interest a few weeks later.

Rather than pretending I'm here to become some sort of fantasy football expert, I'm treating this as an experiment.

Pick a team. Play the Gameweeks. Make some decisions. Get some of those decisions completely wrong. Then come back the following week and do it all again.

That's the plan, anyway.

So, how did the experiment start?

For anyone who missed the beginning of this slightly questionable experiment, I came back to FPL despite barely following the Premier League anymore.

I looked at last season's points and goals, and I tried to make sensible decisions. I spent exactly £100m and, on paper, I didn't hate it.

In fact, I felt reasonably good about the team. There were players I liked, there were some fixtures I liked and there was a vague idea behind most of the selections.

One week later, I'm not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse.

João Pedro understood the assignment

Thank you, João.

Honestly, without João Pedro I'm not sure what this review would look like. While several members of my carefully researched squad were busy doing very little, João decided that somebody should probably score some points.

He scored a goal, added an assist and finished the Gameweek with 11 points.

Eleven points from one of my forwards is exactly what I wanted when I picked him. The slightly annoying part is that he wasn't my captain, because apparently I like making things harder for myself.

Still, I'm taking the win. João Pedro is currently one of the reasons I'm not looking at my squad and immediately thinking about deleting the whole thing.

Marc Guéhi!

There were a few players I felt reasonably confident about before the season started. Marc Guéhi wasn't necessarily one of them.

He was more of a "179 points last season looks nice, I'll have him" kind of decision.

Turns out, that may actually have been enough analysis.

Guéhi scored 10 points after scoring a goal, and suddenly he's the second-highest scorer in my starting XI.

Maybe the spreadsheet knew something after all. Or maybe I got lucky. Let's not investigate too closely and ruin the moment.

My captain got two points...

Yeah...

Semenyo. The player whose points were going to be doubled. Scored two points.

Which becomes four with the captaincy, so technically it isn't a disaster. But João Pedro scored 11 without me giving him the armband, so naturally I'm now questioning every decision I've ever made.

The frustrating thing is that the numbers weren't exactly screaming for a huge haul either. Captain hindsight is a wonderful thing.

The obvious question now is whether I got the captain wrong or whether Gameweek 1 was simply one bad result. I have absolutely no idea yet, which is probably why I'm going to try very hard not to panic after one week.

Thiago somehow got zero

This one is going to annoy me.

Thiago was one of the players I actually felt quite good about before the season started. I saw 22 goals last season, saw £8m next to his name and thought, "Yep. That'll do."

Then Gameweek 1 happened.

He played 82 minutes and finished with 1.00 xG and 1.08 xGI. He had the numbers. He had the minutes. He had the chances.

And somehow?

Zero points.

Notta one. Nada. Zilch.

I'm not even angry at him. I'm just disappointed.

The Arsenal plan was... fine?

I may have accidentally built my entire Gameweek 1 strategy around Arsenal playing Coventry.

Raya. Gabriel. Rice. Three players. One fixture.

Before the deadline, that seemed perfectly reasonable. Arsenal had the fixture, I liked the players and I clearly wasn't worried about putting too many eggs into one basket.

The results were Raya with six, Gabriel with five and Rice with three.

That's 14 points between them. Not exactly the explosion I imagined when I looked at the fixture before the deadline, but nobody completely embarrassed me either.

So we'll take that. For now.

And then there was the bench...

I don't really want to talk about it, but we're going to.

Kelleher scored seven points.
Raya, who I actually started, scored six.

Apparently the entire purpose of owning two playing goalkeepers is to guarantee that you pick the wrong one.

Tarkowski also scored six, Senesi got three and Le Fée got two. That gave me 18 points sitting on the bench.

Eighteen.
Sigh.

Cole Palmer... Oh.

Before Gameweek 1, I left Cole Palmer out.

I publicly put him in my list of rejected players and wrote, "This could age horribly."

Cole Palmer then went away and scored 13 points.

Well, that didn't take long.

The annoying part is that Palmer is £9.5m.
I had that money available in the squad, but I chose to spend it elsewhere.

And the worst part is that I can't even complain. I made the decision. Nobody forced me to leave him out. I looked at £9.5m, looked at the rest of my squad and decided I could live without him.

Apparently Past Jenna was feeling very confident.
Present Jenna is less convinced.

How did everyone actually do?

So... how bad was it?

Not terrible. Which is probably the biggest surprise.

For a team built by someone whose main Premier League research involved looking at numbers and occasionally thinking "yeah, that seems good", Gameweek 1 could have been much worse.

There were some genuine positives.
Guéhi scored 10. João Pedro scored 11.
The Arsenal triple-up didn't collapse.
Raya got a clean sheet and Gabriel did enough to make the decision look reasonable.

There were also some very obvious things I'd like to change.

Thiago got zero.
Kelleher outscored Raya from the bench.
My midfield didn't exactly set the world on fire.

And then there's Cole Palmer.
We don't need to keep talking about Cole Palmer.

What have I actually learned?

One Gameweek isn't enough to decide whether a player is good, bad, a bargain or someone I should immediately transfer out. I know that much.

I also know that expected goals aren't actual goals, a bench goalkeeper will always seem more attractive when he's sitting there with more points than your starter and leaving out a player who then scores 13 points is significantly more annoying when you publicly documented the decision beforehand.

More importantly, though, I think I'm starting to understand what I actually want from this.

I'm not trying to become an FPL expert overnight. I'm not going to suddenly start pretending I can predict every haul or explain exactly why one midfielder is going to score more points than another.

I'm just trying to stick with it.

That's the experiment.

I want to see what happens if I actually keep coming back every Gameweek, make decisions, learn from them and don't immediately abandon the whole thing because one player blanked.

If I can make it through a few bad captain choices, a couple of awful transfers and another Palmer goal without giving up, I'll consider that a win.

So... what now?

One Gameweek isn't enough to decide that the whole team is a disaster.

That's probably the most important thing I've learned from the opening weekend. There are already players I'm looking at differently, there are points sitting on my bench that I'd quite like to have and Cole Palmer has wasted absolutely no time making me regret leaving him out.

But one good Gameweek doesn't suddenly make a player essential, and one bad Gameweek doesn't automatically mean somebody needs to go.

Which is slightly inconvenient, because I have spent most of the week staring at the transfer screen anyway.

There are names I've considered. There are moves I could make. There are several ways I could convince myself that changing something immediately is the sensible option.

The question is whether I actually need to.

Apparently, I'm about to find out.

The transfers I nearly made

Gameweek 1 gave me just enough information to start doubting half my team, but not quite enough information to justify actually changing it.

Which, when you put it like that, is probably exactly how the first week of FPL is supposed to work. One player hauls, another blanks, someone you've never really considered suddenly looks like the best player in the league.

I have spent a fair amount of this week looking at Gonzalo, Barry and Emersonn. All three have had moments where I have thought, "Actually, maybe I should bring them in."

None of the three felt completely ridiculous. Which, honestly, probably made the decision harder.

The problem is that every time I went back through the squad, I ended up asking myself the same question.

Do I actually need to make the transfer?

And the answer, after far too much thinking, is probably no.

I have opened the transfer page more times than I care to admit, moved players around, looked at prices, looked at fixtures, changed my mind and then gone back to the original idea.

Gonzalo, Barry and Emersonn were the three names I kept coming back to.

I could make a case for all three. The problem wasn't finding reasons to bring them in. The problem was finding a good enough reason to use my free transfer after just one Gameweek.

After going round in circles with all three, I eventually decided that maybe I don't need to decide yet.

That's probably the hardest part of FPL for me. Once I start looking at transfers, I want to do something. Leaving a player alone feels like I'm missing an opportunity, even when there isn't really a reason to make the move.

I don't want to throw away a free transfer just because I have become bored with my own squad.

So Gonzalo, Barry and Emersonn are staying on the watchlist for now.

Then came the goalkeeper decision.

The goalkeeper decision was probably more difficult than it should have been because Kelleher actually outscored Raya in Gameweek 1.

Kelleher finished with seven points, while Raya returned six. Kelleher also ranks sixth among goalkeepers for ICT Index, while Raya sits 19th.

So yes, I did spend some time wondering whether I had somehow picked the wrong goalkeeper.

Then I looked at the fixture.

Kelleher faces Leeds, while I already have Leeds players elsewhere in the squad. Wilson and Calvert-Lewin are both involved in that fixture from my side.

And that's where my head started hurting again.

If Leeds score, I could benefit from my attacking players while losing the goalkeeper clean-sheet points. If Kelleher keeps a clean sheet, I'm then sitting there hoping my own Leeds players don't ruin it.

Obviously both things can happen. FPL doesn't care about my carefully planned little conflicts. I just don't particularly fancy giving myself another reason to spend 90 minutes arguing with myself.

So despite Kelleher scoring more last week, Raya starts.

Having Kelleher in goal while hoping my Leeds attackers do well feels like a situation I don't really need to create for myself.

The defence has already changed.

There is one important difference from the original squad heading into Gameweek 2.

Tarkowski has replaced Gabriel.

Guéhi is the obvious bright spot after Gameweek 1. He returned 10 points and ranks fourth among defenders for ICT Index. His Threat ranking of seventh is another reason I don't feel like I need to do anything with him.

I'd rather have seen more than two points from Virgil. But with Forest next up, one Gameweek isn't enough for me to decide that the pick was a mistake.

For now, I'm leaving the three defenders alone.

The defence has already had its change, and I'm not going to make another one just because Virgil didn't give me the score I wanted in the opening week.

Midfield is where I started overthinking again.

Semenyo's two points from Gameweek 1 aren't exactly what I was hoping for.

But then I looked at the numbers behind the score and started talking myself into keeping him again. He ranks 14th among midfielders for Threat and 46th for ICT Index. Those numbers aren't screaming "big mistake" after one Gameweek.

Rice returned three points and stays in the team, while Wilson also scored three. Wilson's Creativity ranking gives me another reason to keep him, especially when I look at the fixtures ahead.

Then there is Le Fée.

He scored two points in Gameweek 1, but Anderson's fitness doubt meant I moved Anderson out of the starting XI and put Le Fée in.

There isn't a grand plan behind that. Anderson was a doubt, Le Fée was available, and I had to pick somebody.

Sometimes FPL really is that simple.

And then Manchester City kicked off.

And this is where my lovely little plan started to look rather stupid.

Anderson started.

Yes, the player I had moved to the bench because I was worried about his fitness was named in the starting XI.

Manchester City kicked off, the team news came through, and there he was.

Starting.

And where had I put him?

Third on my bench.

The frustrating part is that I didn't actually want Anderson out of the team. The fitness doubt was the reason for the benching.

So now I get to spend the game wondering whether I have just left points sitting there while wondering why on earth I put him third.

João Pedro gets the armband.

João Pedro is probably the easiest decision in the entire team.

And after not giving him the captaincy in Gameweek 1, I'm now willing to give him the armband.

Thiago is the frustrating one. He managed just one point in Gameweek 1 despite posting 1.08 xGI.

That's exactly the sort of return that makes you want to start looking at replacements immediately.

But then I look at the rest of the numbers. Thiago ranks 20th for Influence, 19th for Creativity and 21st for Threat among forwards.

So I'm not throwing him out... yet.

Calvert-Lewin is another player who only returned one point.

His Threat ranking of 15th and ICT Index ranking of 25th give me enough reason to wait before deciding that I need to make a change.

The points aren't there yet, but I'm giving him another chance.

Gameweek 2 XI

So after all of the transfer thoughts, goalkeeper debates, fitness doubts and general FPL overthinking, the starting XI has actually changed surprisingly little.

Tarkowski comes in for Gabriel, Le Fée comes in for Anderson, and João Pedro takes the captaincy.

Apart from those changes, I'm giving the squad another chance.

There doesn't seem to be enough evidence after one Gameweek to completely rewrite everything, and I'd rather have two transfers available next week than use one now because I've convinced myself somebody is suddenly essential.

So, what have I actually changed?

The funny thing is that I started the week thinking I had several problems to solve, when I really didn't have any.

João Pedro looks good. Guéhi looks good. Semenyo's underlying numbers are still interesting. Thiago deserves another week, and Calvert-Lewin has enough attacking numbers for me to wait.

The one thing I probably should have done differently was check the Manchester City team news before putting Anderson third on the bench.

But apparently we learn from our mistakes.

Hopefully.

Gameweek 1 gave me enough to think about, but not enough to convince me that the whole squad needs rebuilding.

So the experiment continues. No transfer. No panic. Just another Gameweek and another chance for this team to prove that I either knew what I was doing all along or got incredibly lucky.

Probably a bit of both.