FPL Gameweek 5 Review: What Went Right And Wrong — 6 Oct

GW5 Autopsy: The Week Semenyo Made Fools Of The Armband

Seventeen points from Antoine Semenyo — owned by roughly 1.5 in 10 of us — while nearly three quarters of the game handed the armband to Haaland. That's the whole story of Gameweek 5 in one line.

The average manager posted 48. The top score was 126. The gap between those two numbers was built almost entirely on who was holding the week's hauls — and most of them lived outside the template.

Let's be honest about the damage. Semenyo (17) and Brobbey (17 for Sunderland, owned by fewer than 1 in 10) were the week's twin engines, and Brobbey in particular moved ranks hard — if a rival above you had him, they've pulled away. Then came the proper punts: Dasilva's 15 for Coventry and Schuster's 14 for Brentford, both owned by basically nobody. You can't plan for those, and we shouldn't pretend we can. Chasing 0.3%-owned midfielders is how ranks die slowly.

But here's the comfort, and it matters: the template held its end up. Groß — owned by about 3 in 10, the most popular player on the haul list — banked 14. Tarkowski added 14 for Everton, Hall 13 for Newcastle, both sitting in roughly 1.5 to 2 of every 10 squads. If we owned the sensible, well-owned stuff, we didn't get rich this week, but we didn't bleed either. That's the job. Owning what everyone owns isn't a failure — it's insurance, and weeks like this prove it works both ways.

The captaincy is the sore spot. About 7 in 10 of us went Haaland, and with hindsight the armband belonged on Semenyo's 17. One bad week doesn't make the crowd captain wrong — it makes it unlucky. The maths of captaining the most reliable scorer in the game doesn't break because of one gameweek, and anyone who panic-pivots off the obvious pick next week is solving the wrong problem.

So, the lesson before the next deadline: the one move worth making is getting Semenyo into our squads properly — 17 points at 1.5-in-10 ownership is exactly the kind of player who hurts us from outside and helps us from inside. The one move to protect is the Haaland armband. Don't chase Brobbey, don't touch the Dasilva-Schuster lottery tickets, don't sell the template in a strop.

Buy Semenyo as the free transfer. Keep the captaincy where it was. Hold everything else.