FPL Fortress

A bald striker who likes to tuck in his shirt and bangs in goals for fun? No, he’s not Ronaldo Nazario in the early 2000s while he was playing for Real Madrid. No, he’s arguably even better (and certainly more of an FPL hero at the very least). The club is Crystal Palace, the time is April 2024, the number on his shirt is 14, and the man of the moment is Jean-Philippe Mateta. His whopping 29 points is the capstone of, quite frankly, a feast of a gameweek—one in which the top-scoring FPL team (aptly called “Hakuna Mateta!”) ended on 216 points. Funnily enough, the popular Liverpool assets turned out to be the big disappointments, with the triple-up of Salah, van Dijk, and Robertson getting outscored by Will Hughes. It may be tempting to linger forever on DGW 34, but we must set our sights on the few remaining gameweeks of the season. To that end, we discuss which Chelsea and Spurs assets are good for DGW 35, the Salah problem (crazy that he’s become a “problem”), and overall transfer strategy before the big DGW 37. Since we won’t have time to record an episode next week, we look at captaincy options for GW 36 in addition to GW 35. Jacob presents an enticing idea that Jiayang may just take up next season…

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Unsurprisingly, this episode centers around creating the perfect Free Hit team for GW 34. (And if you’re not using your Free Hit, hopefully the points we hit on will still be valuable in helping you determine who to prioritize with your precious transfer or two). First, we try to figure out the ideal triple-ups from Liverpool and Arsenal; then, we determine who else should be a lock; and finally, we try to logically fill in the remaining spots in our XI. In this last section, we tackle the thought-provoking and delicate act of weighing 1) a good single gameweek player with a good fixture vs. 2) a slightly worse double gameweek player with two slightly worse fixtures. As for captaincy, Jiayang might just channel his inner Sybill Trelawney…

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On paper, this upcoming gameweek seems like it’ll be the last relatively calm one before the inevitable chaos of the tail end of the season ensues. By examining what the best course of action might be for our own teams, we touch on key topics that will hopefully be relevant for many FPL managers right now, such as whether it’s time to move from Darwin/Solanke to Højlund/Isak/Jackson (yes, Nicolas Jackson). Finally, in our captaincy segment, we’re back to pretty much picking between our two old friends, Mo and Erling—though at the moment, it seems like both are stuck in a bit of a rut. Who, then, to go with? Would it be foolish to make this decision based on the famously reliable metric of xNV—expected Negative Vibes?

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As the title of this episode conveys, we are concerned this gameweek with what words rhyme with Romeo’s close friend in Shakespeare’s classic. The answer we present: TIOotIO (pronounced “ti-OO-shee-oh”). Humor us and take a moment to think about what that might stand for—yes, it’s an acronym. Got a guess? Well, if you landed on “The Ins and Outs of the Ins and Outs,” that you’d be right! And we’re aware of the inconsistency of how the “of” and the “the” are represented in the acronym by lowercase letters while the two “and”s are not; we just like the way it sounds better this way. What this crazy acronym means: we talk about the intricacies of the three most transferred-in and transferred-out players for next gameweek, a topic that is always relevant. Somehow, the topic of capitalization comes up yet again later in the episode when Jiayang talks about his strong—at this point, well-established—preference for captaining a player whose upcoming fixture is spelled out in capital letters next to their name. Near the end of the segment, Jacob gets dangerously close to succumbing to a very self-consciously un-scientific way of making captaincy decisions, though he will hopefully NOT do that by the time the Gameweek 32 deadline rolls around.

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The greater good has rarely outweighed my own self-interest. Specificity breeds universality. The ends justify the means. Are you confused because this sounds an awful lot like a philosophy podcast? No, this is still the FPL Fortress! And in fact, we here at the Fortress pride ourselves in forging connections between the ideas we learn in the classroom and the teams we so painstakingly manage in the game. We cover a tremendous amount of ground in this episode, moving from a short segment on the premise of the new Fantasy Challenge game mode; to a review of our predictions last week in which Jiayang expresses renewed disapproval and doubt about the nature of Jacob’s divination; to a lengthy discussion on Jiayang’s GW 31 Wildcard draft. In this segment, we hit on a bunch of important interlinked talking points, including the benefits of having 5 starting midfielders vs. 3 starting forwards, double Arsenal defense vs. double Arsenal attack, and an enlightening explanation of why most people seem to be leaning FH34 + BB37 rather than BB34 + BB37.

In this latest episode of the FPL Fortress, many exciting things happen: Jacob gets bamboozled, Jiayang successfully lands two puns in a row on the spot, and both work together to contemplate the strategy of the Gameweek 30/31 Wildcard that many managers are considering. It’s particularly exciting because Jiayang is visiting Georgetown—so the recording is finally being done in the same room, with the same microphone (Jacob’s trusty JLab Talk Go). After the admittedly not-so-exciting Gameweek 29 Review, the episode really gets going with the nitty-gritty discussion regarding our second Wildcard. For captaincy, Jiayang and Jacob make hyper-specific predictions for how Salah and Son will fare—as you will hear, Jacob shamelessly finagles his prediction to fit his captaincy choice. Maybe the tea leaves were shifting in real time.

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A common piece of advice: trust your intuition. But when your intuition tells you that transferring Haaland out for Carlton Morris is an insane thing to do, don’t trust your intuition. Seriously, there’s a larger point here—even when a certain action seems insane at first glance, it can be very useful to create some distance between yourself and the action in order to approach it from a more logical, clear-headed place. You might even be swayed! (Hint: this exact phenomenon may or not have played out in this episode…) Jacob and Jiayang also try to resolve their first-world problems of having eight great attackers—key word, “try.” And lastly, yet again, there’s an obvious captaincy candidate! But this time, his first name isn’t Erling, his last name isn’t Haaland, and he isn’t exactly Norwegian…

Now that this round of the FA Cup has finished, the Gameweek 29 fixtures are finally confirmed—and boy, they do not look particularly exciting. In this episode, we conduct a thorough investigation on what the best course of action is to prepare for the blank, covering transfer strategies both going into and coming out of the blank and the most important players to own by the time March 16th rolls around. During the captaincy segment, Jacob, as he so often does, prods Jiayang about the psychological soundness behind something he says—this time, it’s about how much Haaland’s glut (apparently the term for scoring 5 goals in a match) against Luton should affect our affect our perception of him as a captaincy candidate against Man United this weekend. But first, both Jacob and Jiayang rue some transfers that didn’t quite work out for them…

FPL is a game that’s often characterized by the feeling of disappointment. Cold, hard, and unadulterated disappointment. And yet, before every seemingly juicy double gameweek, it seems like we FPL managers have a genuine reason to be hopeful. Double Gameweek 25 was one of those gameweeks—how exciting was it that Man City and Liverpool, two of the best teams in the league, would have two nice fixtures each? Alas, disappointment struck once again, especially when we realized that Darwin and Jota together played a mere quarter of the minutes that they could have played. In MJ’s words, perhaps we should come to expect disappointment; that way, we’ll never be disappointed. But there is reason to be hopeful, surely! The stars of today’s shows are Wolves’s dynamic duo up front, Hwang Hee-chan and Pedro Neto. Here’s a fun fact: Man City and Sheffield United are the two teams who have played the most games since a 0-0 (for diametrically opposed reasons, might I add). I daresay it seems almost inevitable—though that is admittedly a dangerous term—that Hwang and Neto will carve through the Blades’s defense (ironic nickname, isn’t it?) like a knife through hot butter. Or is it a hot knife through butter? Either way, the butter doesn’t remain intact…

In this episode, we focus exclusively on Liverpool, Manchester City, and Arsenal, the three teams that comprise the current top three of the Premier League—as such, it should come as little surprise that they also offer some of the best assets in FPL. Players from Liverpool and Man City are particularly hot property this week, given their juicy upcoming double gameweeks. Salah’s impending return and the potential resurgence of Pep Roulette (Man City’s squad is finally fully fit again), however, might just complicate matters a little … but first, we offer you a bit of roleplay involving an animated American and an elitist European!