Stocks may have off weeks but never weeks off. Not so fantasy football assets, who – particularly towards the pointy end of the season – find themselves occasionally ‘blanking’ due to scheduling clashes. Thus, with Arsenal and Manchester City squaring up to each other in the League Cup final on Sunday, neither they nor their slated Premier League opponents (respectively Wolves and Crystal Palace) have a Gameweek 31 fixture.
Cue a rush to offload popular assets from these teams – and perhaps the most predictable Herdwatch list of top ‘sells’ of the season. As you can see in the top left-hand table at the end of this piece, only an injury to Chelsea defender Chalobah has prevented a clean sweep of the highly-owned Haaland, Semenyo and Rice from City and Rice, Timber and Gabriel (nudged into seventh place) from Arsenal.
All of which in turn necessitated much jiggery and no little pokery on the part of our portfolio adviser to turn out anything more than half a team this weekend. Eventually, however, it twigged that playing our second wildcard ahead of Gameweek 32 had two benefits. Not only would it offer some FPL distraction over the upcoming international break, it should also allow us to buy back most of the City and Arsenal assets we offloaded.
Now all that was needed was a plausible excuse – or an excuse, at least. And the one we are going with is using all our carefully stored-up transfers to bring in the two most-bought attackers and midfielders of the week as well as the most-bought defender, in place of Haaland, Rice and Guehi and our pair of effectively non-playing makeweights, Miley and Guehi. The contrasting portfolio possibilities thus go from left to right below:
“All of which in turn necessitated much jiggery and no little pokery on the part of our portfolio adviser to turn out anything more than half a team this weekend.
Source: Fantasy Premier League
Aside from, one would hope, a full squad of players for the weekend, the benefits of this fancy bit of footwork include retaining the services and small amounts of value we have built up in Raya, Gabriel and Semenyo. Furthermore, we can just about argue that buying the third and fourth-owned forwards, Thiago and Ekitiké, is in the spirit of the MeanReversionMachine while the Wilson purchase genuinely is.
On the downside – though, on current form, perhaps not – we may just have to resign ourselves to an ex-Haaland portfolio for the rest of the season. This should at least allow a full – and in due course, when we need it, bench-boostable squad – and, as I say, the prospect of some enjoyable tinkering during the FPL wasteland that stretches from Sunday evening all the way out to 10 April.
If this is indeed the last we see of Haaland in 2025/26, he hardly leaves on high – just four points in the last three gameweeks, including two against West Ham in Gameweek 30. In a generally uninspiring – if somehow above-average – week for the portfolio, the bright spots were, again, Bruno Fernandes, Gabriel and Raya alongside the increasingly impressive, still wonderfully cheap James Hill of Bournemouth:
Finishing up, as usual, with a regular look at our Herdwatch tables of the most bought and sold FPL assets of recent gameweeks, Newcastle duo Thiaw and Gordon top the latest polls. Both do boast that promising ‘Form/Opp’ rating I have highlighted in past columns as most indicative of immediate rewards – though you would imagine Sunderland will be looking to throw a spanner in the works in Sunday’s local derby.
Elsewhere, the latest set of passengers on the Szoboszlai bandwagon – following his haul last time out against Spurs, he is eight in this week’s ‘buy’ table, with 160,000-odd new owners – will hope he continues the form that has yielded 20 points to those who bought him ahead of Gameweek 28. As our bottom right-hand table shows, among the big trades of that week, he has only been outshone by Pedro and Timber – on the ‘sell’ side.
Source: Fantasy Premier League
