The Complete Guide to our FPL Gameweek 18 tips and advice

The headline news this week is undoubtedly the sacking of Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho along with the announcement that Ole Gunnar Solskjær has emerged from the subs bench to take over as caretaker manager.

How will this affect Fantasy managers? Do I Not Like Orange got the ball rolling with a hot topic at the start of the week. Most responses were cautious but with a decent fixture run there are reasons to be optimistic if, as diesel001 pointed out, new manager Solskjær “will play to the players strengths”.

Later in the week Meltens took a deeper look at United assets and how they stack up against those currently vying for attention in our teams. Ibe Wisdom made an insightful comment detailing how Solskjær set his Molde team up, and in turn what we can perhaps expect at United:

“Considering Meltens’ analysis and this take on Ole Gunnar Solskjær as a manager I would say that Martial and Lukaku could be interesting [for] the upcoming games”.

This was in part backed-up from MTPockets, who kindly took the time to summarise a podcast by Nordic Football and gave further insights into what we can expect from United’s new Norwegian manager.

Meanwhile discussion on the site has also focused on the busy festive period. To help with our planning Özil sorted the teams according to rest days, Neale (aka Skonto Rigga) then borrowed this layout for his article on How the FPL Christmas fixture schedule could affect your players.

Mark (aka FPL General) was on hand to give his thoughts on How to navigate the Christmas period picking out Chelsea’s Eden Hazard (£11.0m) and potentially his teammate Pedro Rodriguez (£6.3m) as players to consider.

However with Hazard already in his team, his next transfers will focus on bringing in Manchester City duo Raheem Sterling (£11.6m) and Leroy Sané (£9.7m). After neither of them started the midweek League Cup match, an enticing home fixture against Crystal Palace is too hard to ignore.

Examining the moves of the top managers, Greyhead was back with his regular look at The Great and The Good. Four of the ten managers now reside in the top 10,000 overall as their quality begins to show. Sterling and Sané already form part of the template for this group of managers, with West Ham’s Felipe Anderson (£7.4m) the cool cat now in 8 out of 10 teams.

As David noted this week, West Ham continue to combine form and fixtures, with Anderson and teammate Robert Snodgrass (£5.4m) offering incredible value.

David maintained his superb 100% captain record this season thanks to a last gasp Harry Kane (£12.6m) assist, his Captain Sensible article should therefore be compulsory reading. David confided on this week’s Scoutcast that he is 99% certain to captain Sané, although keep in mind that he doesn’t own potential armband candidates Sterling, Hazard or Aubameyang (£11.5m).

With so many premium attackers to choose from perhaps you are like Az in finding this the most stressful FPL season ever. One way to accommodate an extra premium mid or forward is by downgrading your defence. This was a question answered by former FPL winner Ben Crabtree in this week’s FPL Question Time. He acknowledged:

“The desire to take money out of defence is enhanced given the form of expensive midfielders and fixtures of some expensive forwards.”

This notion is supported by David’s research into clean sheets at this time of year. Inspired by Gameweek 15, which saw all 20 top-flight teams concede at least once, David concludes that there has been a deterioration in clean sheets, noting that:

“While [December] is not always a month devoid of clean sheets, in each of the last three campaigns it was either below the overall season average or lower than the rate recorded up until that point.”

A timely article from Rotation’s Alter Ego takes a look at Aerial threats from the back highlighting some cheap options that could serve as possible makeweights in moves to add an extra premium attacker.

To view all our discussions please visit our Hot Topics page, and if you’ve got some analysis, scout reports or features brewing, be sure to visit our community section to submit your article.

If you’re a member and are yet to get to grips with the custom statistics tables, you can view this movie for an explanation of how they work. Also, remember to tag them so that people can find the tables with ease.

COMMUNITY TOURNAMENTS

The latest draws for both the FFS Cup and FFS Members Cups have taken place. At this stage there are still 128 managers left in each cup, the finals will take place Gameweek 24.

In TorresMagic’s Last Man Standing the safety score in Gameweek 17 was 43, this saw 151 managers depart leaving 1,335 still standing.

Matthieu Raoux still leads our main FFS League and remains fourth overall, only 17 points off top spot. The New Zealander is being very patient in his approach having only made 12 transfers so far. He is also yet to play his wildcard or any other chips.

Tore Bjørheim has a 15 point lead at the top of our FFS Members League. The Manchester United fan remains first in Norway, despite slipping to eighth overall. I wonder if he’s excited about Solskjær’s appointment?

Fellow Norwegian Aleksander Våge Nilsen is the new leader in the FFS Live Hall of Fame. Aleksander is 21st overall and in the past four seasons has achieved ranks of 162 and 487. In contrast to Tore, Aleksander is a Liverpool fan. As an aside, did you know that the word ‘Scouser’ comes from a Norwegian food called ‘lobscouse’? It’s a stew eaten by Norwegian sailors that the Liverpudlians also developed a taste for.

For those interested, it appears the new HoF leader has transferred in Southampton’s Danny Ings (£5.5m) for Arsenal’s Alexandre Lacazette (£9.6m). This is according to FPL Transfer Spy which was correct with last week’s prediction for Magnus Carlsen.

You may also have heard this week that there was a dispute over which match out of Liverpool and Manchester United Norwegian Broadcaster League TV2 would show on Boxing Day – it was scheduled to be Liverpool this year. Thankfully this has been resolved with the broadcaster now showing both games. So hopefully that makes both Tore and Aleksander happy.

Finally, in case you looked at their teams and wondered why they are also in a Broadcaster League, all Norwegians are in the TV2 Broadcaster League. TV2 used to make their own Fantasy Football game but stopped doing so when they became part of the official FPL game. The Broadcaster League was created when that change happened.

Back to FFS, Mark Sutherns (aka Mark) is the new leader in the FFS Mods & Cons and has moved up to third in the Live Hall of Fame. In the twelve seasons that he’s been playing Fantasy Football he’s finished in the top 4,000 eight times. Four of those were also in the top 400, the best one being 42nd in 2014/15. Mark is currently 3,409 overall.

Mark also made a festive appearance on the FPL Show this week.

Luke Aiello has increased his lead at the top of RedLightning’s Top 10k Any Season mini-league to 21 points. Hazard’s 13 points helped him to a total of 62 points in Gameweek 17. Luke moves up to 15th in the overall standings.

RedLightning’s January to May League will start scoring in Gameweek 21. Over 220 teams have already entered, the code to join is 1637-756.

After the fourth round of FFS Manager Melee Community Tournament, only The Godfather: Pardew have a 100% record. There are two matchdays to go before the knockout stages begin with qualification set to be hotly contested, good luck to all the teams taking part.

If you are running a community tournament and would like the latest scores included in future Community Round-Ups, please email us a summary of the current leaders and a link to your league, spreadsheet or head-to-head competition at geoff@fantasyfootballscout.co.uk