The Template: What Everyone Owns
Gameweek 1 and the crowd has already picked its XI — our job is to know which bits we genuinely have to match.
The most-owned legal eleven costs £85.5m, and the spine of it is barely optional. Haaland at £15.5m sits in roughly 7 in 10 squads and our model has him among the very best returns over the opening six — around 31 points, with the kind of week where he wins people their month. Bruno Fernandes (£12.0m, about 5 in 10) projects the same sort of total; he's a solid haul most weeks and can go big when the penalties and set pieces land. João Pedro at £7.5m is owned by a shade over half of managers and comes in around 22 over six, which is proper value at that price. Szoboszlai (£7.0m, nearly 5 in 10) lands around 23. Those four are the shields. Not owning them isn't bravery, it's a bet you have to win twice.
At the back, Gabriel (£8.0m) is the strongest of the defensive picks on our numbers — around 22 over the first six, driven by clean sheets and his knack for nicking goals from corners — and only about 1 in 4 have him. Guéhi at £6.0m projects close behind. Raya (£6.0m) is the keeper the crowd has settled on. Shaw at £4.5m is the cheapest way to fill a slot; he's a budget body, not a points source, and we should treat him that way.
The honest caveat: this is pre-season overall ownership, not top-10k. The wider game is slower and stickier than the sharp end, so some of these names will drain away fast once real minutes and real fixtures land in GW1. We also haven't seen the crowd move yet — there's no shift to follow, only a starting position. Expect the picture to look different in a fortnight.
FPL VERDICT. Buy and hold the four shields — Haaland, Fernandes, João Pedro, Szoboszlai — and take Gabriel at £8.0m as the defender with the most to offer. Captain Haaland in GW1; nothing in our projections argues for cleverness this early. The one template piece it's safe to skip is Calvert-Lewin at £6.0m: about 2 in 10 own him, the projected return is the softest of the forwards, and that £6.0m is better spent elsewhere. Match the core, skip the striker, sleep fine.