We are one week from the first deadline of the season, how's everyone's teams coming along?
Lots to update you on with my team. I cannot wait for the season to get going. 🥳
I'm truly overwhelmed by the popularity of the Focal app and fpl.page, 40,000 new users in pre-season, 241,000 active users over the last year now. We've put in serious hours to bring loads of new features for you and we've got some really exciting additions coming over the next week. There is a new premium plan that hides all ads, gives you full dashboard customization like rearranging widgets, colour themes. You also get weekly articles written by me, predicted line-ups for all 20 teams every gameweek and can unlock premium features on widgets. All that for £0.46p per week or 39p if you sign up for the whole season. 1 week left to take advantage of that pre-season discount before it goes up!
In goal is one position I've not wavered with Sanchez. Chelsea clicked defensively at the end of last season, keeping 6 clean sheets in 11 games and he's got the potential to match the 5.5m keepers which is why he's in. However it's just been announced that Colwill suffered an ACL injury in training the other day and yesterday underwent surgery. He'll be a big loss in LCB and Chelsea's CB pairing is unclear now, certainly less settled. I'm not as keen on the other 5m keepers so as it stands it's Sanchez or drop down to a 4.5m keeper. Which keeper are you all on at the moment?
In defence it's Van De Ven, Murillo and Gvardiol.
Now the elephant in the room is Spurs literally just got battered by Bayern 4-0 which is not what you want to see when you own a Spurs defender. Trying not to be reactionary, they've got the best clean sheet odds for GW1 home to Burnley and he's not a set and forget starter in my team, the intention is to rotate him in and out. Let's also not forget they kept a clean sheet against Arsenal before the Bayern game, and were missing a lot of players vs Bayern, some of which will be back GW1, some won't. I'm still investigating 4.5m defender rotations. I'm also expecting Spurs to be a much better defence than they were under Ange. I was playing around with defender rotations just before I hit record and Spurs with Bournemouth is an interesting pairing too, I might wildcard GW13 for fixture swings and even going that far back Spurs and Bournemouth still pair together really nicely.
Defensive contributions are going to play a big part this season, so I'm trying to factor that in to my picks. Tom Radley from the Scout team has produced some fantastic graphics this pre-season on def con data, this measures average contributions per game, then the percentage of the time that players hit the 10+ threshold in home, away and overall. Tarkowski is miles ahead having his at least 10 in 66% of games, in second it's Murillo who hit it 52% of the time just over every other game. Tie that in with clean sheet potential and bonus potential there could be games where he hits 10 points for a clean sheet and no goal involvements.
Why Gvardiol then? If he's so bad for def cons? I might be alone in this thinking but obviously in left back he'll have racked up fewer contributions, the CBs always do better but I'm also looking at the fixtures compared to the other 6m defenders and I really prefer Man City's fixtures over Arsenal and Liverpool's. Arsenal have Liverpool, Man City and Newcastle in their opening 6, Liverpool have Newcastle and Arsenal, plus Chelsea away GW7. City have Arsenal in GW5 but other than that the run is better. There is a risk with Pep, no one is completely nailed besides Haaland but I'd like to think Gvardiol is whether it's LCB or LB. DCs have become such a big talking point I also wouldn't be surprised if premium defenders that get less DC points still do well for their extra clean sheets and that will become an obvious thing in hindsight 5 or so gameweeks in.
In midfield some changes!