With Fantasy Premier League (FPL) resuming on Boxing Day, we’ll be welcoming back our stellar team of Pro Pundits and Hall of Famers for the restart.

Only Premium Members are able to read every single one of these pieces, so sign up today to get full access not just to the editorial content but all of the other benefits, from hundreds of Opta stats to a transfer planner.

Here, former FPL champion Simon March speculates on what we can expect to see come Gameweek 17.

As we near the much-anticipated return of FPL, we Fantasy managers enter yet uncharted waters. We’ve experienced winter breaks and a season suspended prior to Project Restart but we’ve never had a season stopped approximately halfway through for a World Cup tournament. Will it be ‘business as usual’ or will we look at this period as a ‘hinge’ on which the rest of it turns? About which players will we be saying “He’s never been the same since the World Cup”?

Realistically, the circumstances are so unique that we’ve no idea what to expect once the Premier League resumes and it would be foolish to even try and make predictions. So, with that in mind, here are a few predictions for what to expect when FPL returns.

It should be a big opportunity…

Actor and director Woody Allen once said “90% of success is just showing up” and I expect this axiom to also be evident once FPL resumes. If ever there was an FPL deadline that is designed to be missed, it is a deadline set for 11am on a Monday, which also happens to be Boxing Day, following a six-week international break.

The only thing worse than missing an FPL deadline is having to read posts from people who have missed the deadline but at least we can enjoy them in the knowledge that, whoever does miss the deadline (and there will be loads of them) has likely handed the rest of us a pretty big advantage.

On top of those who intend(ed) to keep playing FPL beyond the restart but forgot, there will also be those who just couldn’t be bothered and, just as with Project Restart, the active player base will contract. Although, logically, this is less likely to be the case with those managers who come into Gameweek 17 with a relatively high rank, there is little doubt that the opportunity for green arrows, and big green arrows at that, are greater than they were before the break.

…but we might have to wait a while to see its effect

Despite the above, we should also acknowledge that all those managers who are still playing go into Gameweek 17 with unlimited transfers and, among dedicated FPL managers in particular, we are likely to see a fair amount of homogeneity in our team selections. This might, to some extent, mitigate the opportunity to make big rank gains early on, while our teams continue to resemble one another’s and/or we all benefit from the opportunity to fully reform our squads.

It’s also worth noting that, historically, the template has sometimes struggled to outperform auto-filled squads, let alone those that have been actively managed for 16 Gameweeks prior. So, just because we will likely see more ‘ghost teams’ than before, it doesn’t mean our active teams will necessarily outperform them straight away.

Thus, there is every chance that, despite all the promise of the circumstance, we might not actually see those green arrows for a few Gameweeks, though they should come eventually.

We may see early-season dynamics replicated in mid-season

Putting the Christmas schedule (which is always fairly crazy) to one side, typically, as we enter January Premier League teams start to perform more as you’d expect them to, with the ‘bigger teams’ scoring more goals and keeping more clean sheets and the ‘smaller teams’ beginning to struggle ever more with the demands of the Premier League schedule. 

However, following a six-week break, these norms could be turned on their heads and we may see a revival of early-season dynamics where the ‘smaller teams’, fully fit and motivated, tend to deliver more upsets. 

The added factor here is that the bigger teams tend to be more represented at the World Cup (particularly in the later stages) than the smaller clubs, meaning that it could be even more difficult for the big sides to settle early on as they rest or welcome back their players following international duty.

Therefore, while we might typically expect teams like Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United to push on at this stage of the season, we might see them struggle for consistency in the short term. Meanwhile, there might be opportunities among those teams for whom the World Cup has caused less upheaval.

In particular, I can’t help thinking that Brentford, whose fixtures on paper look far from ideal with Spurs and Liverpool at home and West Ham United away in their next three matches, could, in fact, provide one or two upsets, with Ivan Toney (£7.4m), in particular, an interesting option away from the more obvious big-hitters – so long as he’s not suspended, of course.

Summary

Given how unique the circumstances surrounding FPL’s return to action are, it is, of course, difficult to make firm predictions on what to expect. It seems unlikely that the typical dynamics for this stage of the season will apply immediately and, therefore, it could offer a good opportunity for some ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, especially for those managers who need to gain some ground in this second half of the campaign.

Whatever happens on the pitch, however, we can be reasonably confident that our competition among FPL managers will be somewhat diminished compared to what it was when we entered the World Cup break, meaning that outsized advantages will be available for those among us who stay dedicated and alert. For reasons mentioned, however, we might have to wait a few weeks before we actually see these results in full, so don’t be dissuaded if Gameweek 17 doesn’t entirely deliver on the hype.