# The Gameweek 1 wildcard draft

> A 3-5-2 projecting 54.85 xPts, inside a squad costing £98.5m of the £100.0m budget.

By the evmax model · 4 August 2026 · https://evmax.ai/fpl/gw1/wildcard/

The draft is a 3-5-2 projecting 54.85 xPts from the starting eleven, wrapped in a legal fifteen — two goalkeepers, five defenders, five midfielders, three forwards — that spends £98.5m of the £100.0m budget and leaves £1.5m in the bank.

> The four bench places are budget, not squad depth: every pound parked there is a pound the eleven that actually scores never gets to spend.

Which is why the bench is the cheapest legal one available — O'Shea, Dubravka, Davis and Destan, £16.5m between them. They exist to make the fifteen legal, not to be picked.

No club is at the three-player cap in this draft, which is rarer than it sounds — the cap is usually what stops a wildcard from simply buying the best side's entire defence.

The money is concentrated in B.Fernandes (£12.0m), Saka (£9.5m) and Thiago (£8.0m). The pick doing the most per pound is O'Shea, 0.92 xPts per million at £4.0m.

**Bottom line:** Field a 3-5-2 projecting 54.85 xPts: £98.5m spent, £1.5m banked, and a bench that does nothing but keep the squad legal.

## The data

| # | Player | Team | xPts | Price | Captain EV | Ceiling | Owned % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | B.Fernandes | MUN | 7.42 | 12.0 | 14.84 | 16.82 | 48.7% |
| 2 | Thiago | BRE | 5.62 | 8.0 | 11.24 | 13.73 | 16.0% |
| 3 | Watkins | AVL | 5.20 | 8.0 | 10.39 | 13.67 | 12.2% |
| 4 | Ndiaye | EVE | 5.04 | 6.0 | 10.07 | 14.90 | 20.0% |
| 5 | E.Le Fée | SUN | 4.95 | 6.0 | 9.91 | 13.36 | 9.9% |
| 6 | Gibbs-White | NFO | 4.92 | 8.0 | 9.84 | 13.71 | 12.3% |
| 7 | Saka | ARS | 4.89 | 9.5 | 9.78 | 15.64 | 10.7% |
| 8 | Senesi | TOT | 4.45 | 6.0 | 8.89 | 10.68 | 11.3% |
| 9 | Virgil | LIV | 4.37 | 6.5 | 8.74 | 10.86 | 15.8% |
| 10 | Tarkowski | EVE | 4.31 | 6.0 | 8.63 | 10.71 | 9.9% |
| 11 | Raya | ARS | 3.68 | 6.0 | 7.36 | 8.07 | 30.2% |
| 12 | O'Shea | IPS | 3.66 | 4.0 | 7.32 | 9.39 | 1.2% |
| 13 | Dubravka | TOT | 2.85 | 4.0 | 5.69 | 6.98 | 24.8% |
| 14 | Davis | IPS | 2.62 | 4.0 | 5.24 | 7.87 | 4.1% |
| 15 | Destan | HUL | 1.04 | 4.5 | 2.07 | 5.90 | 2.7% |

---
Method: Player scoring rates (goals, assists, defensive contributions) come from each player's own FPL data, not betting markets; match outcomes (de-vigged market odds, or a team-strength rating when a fixture isn't priced) drive 50k Monte-Carlo simulations, scored on the official Fantasy Premier League points table.
Data license: CC BY 4.0 (attribution: evmax, https://evmax.ai). Machine-readable JSON: https://evmax.ai/api/fpl/gw1/wildcard.json