The Gameweek 1 wildcard draft
A 3-5-2 projecting 54.85 xPts, inside a squad costing £98.5m of the £100.0m budget.
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.
The data
| # | Player | 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 SUNDifferential | 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 EVEDifferential | 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 IPSDifferentialBench | 3.66 | 4.0 | 7.32 | 9.39 | 1.2% |
| 13 | Dubravka TOTBench | 2.85 | 4.0 | 5.69 | 6.98 | 24.8% |
| 14 | Davis IPSDifferentialBench | 2.62 | 4.0 | 5.24 | 7.87 | 4.1% |
| 15 | Destan HULDifferentialBench | 1.04 | 4.5 | 2.07 | 5.90 | 2.7% |
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.
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How we get these numbers. 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. Ceiling = the 85th-percentile outcome across our 50,000 simulations — the score when a player's best realistic game happens, not a fantasy cap. Every figure here is machine-readable at /api/fpl/gw1/wildcard.json.