Is it possible to win FPL without making a transfer all season? 🤔
That sounds like a ridiculous question, but prepare to have your mind blown in a way that you might have ever experienced reading an FPL article. We spend 10 months every season watching games, making transfers, weighing up chip usage, captaincy, etc. It can take a ton of effort to do well, and FPL has so much variance there is no guarantee that more time spent on the game equals a better rank.
Is there a theoretical team that exists that, if you'd picked it in GW1 and not made a transfer, you'd be able to win FPL? 🏆
For this one, I got help from Sertalp Bilal, who is a wizard with FPL analytics. He said, "Yeah, of course, let me take a look and get back to you." It's not as simple as picking the 15 top-scoring players; you need to keep it under the £100m GW1 budget, and you need to calculate the optimal auto-subs for your bench when a player doesn't play or has a blank gameweek.
So here's the team:
- Sels in goal 🥅
- Trent, Munoz, and Milenkovic in defense 🛡️
- Mbeumo, Palmer, Luis Diaz, and Salah in midfield ⚽
- Wissa, Wood, and Isak up front 🚀
On the bench: Flekken, Bowen, Ait-Norui, and Kerkez.
So as a starting point, if you'd picked this team in GW1 and literally left it the entire season with Salah set & forget captain, you would be on 2,617 points, you'd be 364th in the world. A comfortable top 1K finish, though 135 points behind rank 1.
Now, obviously, the entire premise of this article is we're talking in hindsight with some perfect choices that would have to be made.
The bench boost, triple captain, and assistant manager do not require transfers. If the bench boost was used perfectly, that's an extra 25 points. The triple captain on Salah in DGW24, fair enough, most of us had him captained for his 29 points. And then Glasner assistant manager GW28 set & forget for 3 weeks where he scored 49 points. However, there's nothing in the bank, so that rules that out.
How much does that come to? You're now on 2,680 points with no transfer, 81 points behind rank 1.
That gap can be easily made up with a few different captaincies to Salah set & forget:
- Palmer's 25-pointer vs. Brighton in GW6 ✨
- Mbeumo's 20 points vs. Southampton in GW20 🎯
Two more like that, and congrats, you've won FPL by 12 points and haven't made a transfer all season, no wildcard, assistant manager, or free hit used.
So as far as a pure set & forget team, you could finish Top 1K in the world by entering a team back in August and not touching it for all 38 gameweeks. Or further to that, if you'd used the bench boost and triple captain chips, while taking the armband off Salah just 3 or 4 times, you would win FPL with not a single transfer made. 🤯