FPL Fortress

The heart of this week’s episode lies in the question of class. With Konsa seemingly a given, which combination of players from the following “classes” of defenders offers the best way to complete your backline: a premium playing for a good team with high clean sheet odds, a Vušković-type DEFCON magnet that’ll tick along over the course of the season, or an explosive attacking fullback whose returns fluctuate depending on their fixture run? We extend this structural analysis to the midfielders with a social scientific bend—Bruno sits at the top, monarchical; the Palmer-Saka class of aristocrats follows; after that, the £7.0m–£8.0m bourgeoisie; then, the working class, comprised of DEFCON warriors like Alex Scott and Mamadou Sangaré; and finally, the (with all due respect) peasant-like bench fodder. One must wonder, how would Marx have played FPL?

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The Fortress is thrilled to return for our 7th year, awakening from a World Cup-filled summer slumber feeling energized and ready to tackle whatever the 2026–27 season throws our way. The big talking point ahead of Gameweek 4 is Chelsea’s home fixture against Hull City—and though a quick glance at the table might suggest that it’ll be a titanic battle where an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, a closer look at Hull’s xGA reveals that managers might be wise to invest heavily in JPMorgan—that is, João Pedro, Cole Palmer, and Morgan Rogers. We also discuss how such an investment could coincide with a larger-scale reshuffling of one’s portfolio of players in the form of a Wildcard, which would enable managers to optimize their Arsenal assets and refine their team structure after now having a few weeks’ worth of valuable information. Finally, in our Captaincy segment, we address the question that gives this episode its name: is it too reckless to go as far as captaining one of JPMorgan instead of Haaland, or are they too big to fail?

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Everyone stop what you’re doing—yes, yes, the rumors are true, the Fortress has released our 2025/26 Season Review! We might be a little embarrassed that it’s been nearly two months since our last episode, but we’re far more excited to finally bring to you our reflections on this past year of Fantasy Premier League. Overall, although it’s been an underwhelming campaign for both Jacob and I, we still have a great time discussing our nominations for this season’s superlatives (for better or for worse), standout XIs (for better or for worse), and highlight moments (for better or for worse). For this year’s lessons learned, both of us have decided, independently of one another, to frame them as questions instead of statements—perhaps a salute to the idea that there is no single “correct” way to play FPL. And yet, at the end of the episode, we resolve to set a few rules for ourselves next season, in an effort to formalize our attempts to strive asymptotically along the path of constant betterment.

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This past gameweek, big things happened at both the top and bottom of the Premier League table, with Arsenal taking a massive step toward that elusive title and Tottenham pulling themselves out of the relegation zone. Is it time to similarly shake things up in our FPL teams? Ahead of the final double gameweek of the season, we revisit the question of how many Crystal Palace players to invest in, as well as whether moving Semenyo to Cherki would form the ideal Man City triple-up. Perhaps as exciting as the prospect of hauls from our Man City players is the opportunity to boot Cole Palmer from our teams, after Chelsea lost their sixth consecutive league game. Unable to look past Man City for captaincy this week, we end the episode by wondering if we’ll have the courage to put the armband on Cherki—or even Nico O’Reilly—instead of Haaland.

If you’re like us, you’ve just used your Wildcard, Bench Boost, and then Free Hit, back-to-back-to-back, thereby exhausting all of your chips for the season (and hopefully having moved significantly closer to your rank target!). Now that the dust has settled, it’s back to good ol’ standard chipless FPL for the final four gameweeks of the season. With Crystal Palace set to double in Gameweek 36, we consider which of their players (presuming everyone is already tripled-up on Man City) might be the most desirable, as well as which assets who are currently in our teams from the Wildcard might be the most well poised to make way. Captaincy feels closer than usual—Everton away looks potentially tricky for Haaland, while Bruno could benefit from an open game against Liverpool at home—especially keeping in mind that he’s certainly gunning for that illustrious, elusive record of 20 assists in a single season.

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Double Gameweek 33 was truly one for the ages, with both Jacob and Jiayang finishing on a whopping 124 points. The very teams that served us so well last week, however, have no fixtures this upcoming week, meaning most active managers will need to activate their Free Hit. Accordingly, we spend the bulk of this episode evaluating the best teams and players to target, in the hopes of building the best draft possible. Along the way, we foray into the virtues of one Glenn Murray, as well as the addictingly alliterative nature of names such as Pedro Porro—who we discover may actually be the sauciest player in the league?

It’s a bit of a quiet week in FPL, but here at the Fortress, we’re committed to producing insightful content—week in, week out, no matter the circumstance. To that end, after reviewing Gameweek 32 and then briefly discussing single-gameweek players to consider for the upcoming double, we meditate on the general rigidity of the current template. We think that this phenomenon is largely due to the “death of the premium,” which has lifted the budgetary constraints that managers had to face in past years when juggling multiple firing big-hitters. But what other factors could be contributing to the homogenizing of teams—for instance, how has the implementation of DEFCON shaken up the meta for defenders?

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After the longest mid-season break the Premier League has ever experienced (a statement that has not been fact-checked but feels undeniably true), we are finally back to discuss best strategies for the run-in to Gameweek 38. Arsenal crashed out of the FA Cup, which means Wildcarding in preparation for what was supposed to be a juicy Bench Boost in Double Gameweek 33 is suddenly far less attractive—but we think Wildcarding this gameweek might still be the optimal move, given the ever-decreasing time left in the season. With six teams still doubling, we peruse the best options from each of them, ultimately arriving at a suggested Wildcard draft. Though the draft may look a little underwhelming at first glance, it’s the best we’ve got—and the best is all we can ever strive for.

With both Arsenal and Man City blanking next gameweek, Jiayang’s and Jacob’s teams—both of which are tripled up on each of the two clubs—look a little worse for wear. The good news? We’re both stockpiled on free transfers. The question: how many of those free transfers should we use for the upcoming blank, if the plan is to Wildcard the following gameweek? The answer (we think): all of them. Tune in to find out which players we feel would be the best one-week punts to plug the Arsenal- and Man City–shaped holes in most FPL managers’ teams.

One of the good things about the FPL Fortress is that even if Jacob and Jiayang both have rotten gameweeks individually, the rottenness does not necessarily seep into the quality of our episode—in fact, one might even argue that the worse our teams are doing at any given point, the more compelling and useful our discussion. To that end, Jiayang has realized that he currently only has a dismally low five players who will play in Blank Gameweek 31. In response, Jacob uses a methodical framework to dissect Jiayang’s team, advising him on the best moves to make in the lead-up to the Blank. While we’re discussing the three cheap Bournemouth wingers, we also take a moment to reminisce about past instances of n attackers competing for n-minus-one spots.