With the next Fantasy Premier League (FPL) deadline almost upon us, we’re getting insight and team reveals from our panel of Hall of Famers and guest writers.

Here, three-time top 500 finisher FPL General talks us through Gameweek 9, plus his plans for Gameweek 10.

Gameweek 9 Review

It was another red arrow last weekend, dropping from 823k to 927k. A quick look at LiveFPL shows how tightly bunched managers still are in the rankings after nine Gameweeks. At 927k, I’m only 22 points ahead of 2m and 41 points behind the top 100k. A couple of good Gameweeks is all that I require to make a big jump this season. It feels like a game of snakes and ladders.

With so many good picks, we’re going into each weekend with three or four players we’d love to own but instead spend the weekend fearing how much they’re going to hurt us. This is exactly how FPL should be! 

The plan last week was to bring in Son Heung-min (£9.9m) for the yellow-flagged Bukayo Saka (£10.0m) but it then emerged that Son was unlikely to feature so I shelved that idea. There was a strong temptation to take a punt on Phil Foden (£9.3m) for the home Southampton fixture but in the end, I decided to keep Saka – which paid off.

The main reason for rolling the transfer was to make it possible to get Mohamed Salah (£12.7m) with two frees. Deciding which players to lose to accommodate the Liverpool midfielder is the hard part…

The Gabriel Magalhaes (£6.2m) injury is concerning with my bench already looking thin. My hope is that it’s a short-term layoff and that he’s back in time for the Nottingham Forest fixture in Gameweek 12 after the international break, if not sooner. In the meantime, hopefully I can soldier through the next two weekends with Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.0m), Rico Lewis (£4.8m) and Vitalii Mykolenko (£4.3m). With all the injuries at Manchester City, Lewis is looking more nailed with every passing week which is great.

In the near future, I’d like to replace Mark Flekken (£4.5m) and Dominic Calvert-Lewin (£6.0m) who are underperforming. Ideally, I want to replace my £4.5m forward at some point in order to have eight available attackers for the busy December period. I need to ask Santa for more free transfers or better still, an extra Wildcard! Arsenal’s David Raya (£5.6m) is the most likely to replace Flekken around Gameweek 12/13.   

Gameweek 10 Bus Team

For more, make sure you check out this week’s latest episode of the 59th Minute Podcast. Good luck this weekend, all!