FPL Gameweek 1 Review: What Went Right And Wrong

The average manager scored 50. The top score was 131, and you don't get to 131 with a sensible squad — you get there with Mendy and Ajayi of Hull (15 and 14 points, both owned by hardly anyone), or Stach of Leeds (13 points, about 2 in 100 of us had him). These are lottery tickets that happened to come in. Sangaré and Kayode at Brentford (14 and 13) were slightly less obscure at roughly 1 in 13 owned, but still moved ranks for the few who held them.

The one template-adjacent haul was Palmer's 13 for Chelsea — owned by about 1 in 7, so it kept ranks steady rather than launching them.

And the armband? About 7 in 10 of us gave it to Haaland, and the perfect captain in hindsight was... De Cuyper. Nobody captains a Brighton wing-back in GW1, and nobody should have. That's the point.

Here's the lesson, and we'd ask you to sit with it before doing anything rash.

A week like this is designed to make you panic. Low-owned defenders hauled, the crowd's captain didn't top the week, and someone in your mini-league scored 90 with a squad that looks like it was picked by a dartboard. The temptation is to chase — sell a premium, take a hit, grab the Brighton pair before GW2.

Don't. One gameweek is one gameweek. The template exists because it's built on players who score reliably week after week, not once. Palmer hauling is the template working. Ajayi hauling is noise until he does it again. If De Cuyper keeps producing, there'll be time to move — with a free transfer, calmly, once we've seen the minutes are safe and the returns aren't a fluke.

The call: hold. No hits, no knee-jerk sales, no swapping Haaland's armband for a punt because one wild week said so. Roll the free transfer if nothing's broken, and if you must move, make it a like-for-like fix — not a chase. We protect the rank by staying calm when everyone else isn't.