Hi, my name is Luke also known as FPLIrons on Twitter, I create social media content and write a few blogs for @FantasyFootyFix. A few years ago, I was the classic FPL player that would create a team a few hours before the GW1 deadline, and never touch the team again for the season. FPL never interested me, it simply hadn’t lured me in, that was until my manager at work said he could beat me easily… That’s when I began to care, it become competitive! This was at the beginning of the 18/19 season, and luckily for me, I began to browse YouTube videos and came across fantasyfootballfix.com, I instantly fell in love. Football, stats, planning, projections, all in one place. It was the dream website for a lifelong football fan and lover of stats/numbers. I’ve used the site more and more each year and my ranks have improved each time, 300k, 30k, 15k, I truly believe that if you use fantasyfootballfix.com correctly it’s almost impossible to fall outside the top 100k.
My favourite tool on the site is the Rotation Planner, this is a fantastically useful tool to save yourself a bit of cash and find some cheaper players that will rotate nicely each gameweek. You are able to choose a length of time, how many players you would like to play/bench and then finally, which teams you would like to include and which ones you wouldn’t.
In the example below, I wanted to give myself a strong bench this season, so I used the tool to find a pair of £4.5m defenders that would give me a reliable first sub each week. I removed all teams that do not have a £4.5m defender, and then locked in Leeds as I believed that Ayling was a really strong £4.5m option this season based on his statistics last year. The algorithm informed me that the best defensive rotation pairing with Leeds was Arsenal, therefore I chose Ben White. This means my first sub for the first 8 weeks will play Brentford, Everton, Burnley, Norwich, Burnley, West Ham, Watford and Palace.
The Assistant Manager/Points projections
fantasyfootballfix.com have an incredibly advanced points projection tool that not only informs you who to captain, play and bench each week, but also which player you could potentially look to sell and who to replace them with.
For example, in my current team the projections are telling me to bench Mason Greenwood in 3 of the next 4 gameweeks. This is due to his low xMins and high likelihood of being rotated. Therefore, I used the ‘single click optimiser’ in order to find a better replacement as £7.5m is a substantial amount of money on a player with such low projections. I was informed to bring in Harvey Barnes, who is predicted to help my squad score 9 points more across the next 5 gameweeks.
Of course, these are only projections and FPL is not an exact science, but more often than not Fix is spot on! So much so, my Fiancé uses the site to improve her transfer planning as I “apparently” don’t give good advice, but fantasyfootballfix.com does. Nightmare!
The official Fantasy Premier League’s ‘Fixture Difficulty Ratings’ are often criticised, teams like West Ham, Leeds and Villa who had impressive seasons were classed as a good fixtures, but games against clubs like Arsenal who were having a poor season were classed as very difficult.
On the fantasyfootballfix.com website and app, you are able to analyse fixtures based on defensive difficulty and offensive difficulty, and these ratings change each gameweek based on how teams are performing. In the example below, I have looked at gameweeks 2-6, in terms of attacking difficulty, Manchester City have the 2nd best fixtures in the coming weeks based on their ability and their opponents capability, however, they do not find themselves in the top 5 for defensive difficulty. Therefore, I would consider moves for the likes of Mahrez. De Bruyne or Grealish, rather than looking to bring in Dias or Cancelo, as clean sheets are unlikely in comparison to attacking hauls.
The ‘Fix Stats’ tab is where the site comes into its own in my opinion, the amount of detail you can go into analysing players is incredibly impressive. An example I have here is Jamie Vardy’s heat map for the 2020/21 season within the player heatmaps screen. It’s a heatmap that I love as a fantasy football manager, it shows me that Jamie Vardy is only interested in getting the ball in the box. When Leicester have a great run of games, based on this and knowing that he is on penalties, you can’t go wrong with Jamie Vardy.
An added bonus of this screen is the comparison you can do between two players, the example below I found when analysing Kevin De Bruyne vs Bruno Fernandes for the 21/22 season. Kevin De Bruyne’s underlying statistics per 90 far exceed Bruno Fernandes, and he could potentially be a great differential when fit, moving away from a player like Bruno Fernandes would of course be a brave move, but potentially one worth taking!
The Custom Stats Builder is a tool I have only just started using, and I am so frustrated that my past self didn’t give it a go!
You have the ability to create tables and graphs with over 200 different statistics and a number of different variables such as position, price, season, gameweek, home/away, team, opposition and ownership.
The example I looked into during pre-season was £7-8m strikers and how their underlying statistics looked last season. Ollie Watkins came out on top with 6 expected assists and 15 expected goals, Bamford also looks fantastic with nearly 18 expected goals.
The exciting part about this is that the possibilities are literally endless, you could look into FPL Bandwagons or FPL conspiracies, and do your own research. For example, I use this along with the Player Heatmaps tool to analyse how Bruno performed with Paul Pogba, and also to see how Leeds performed defensively in the 2nd half of the season. Whatever weird stat you’d like to find, you’ll be able to do it here!
The tool I am most excited to use this season is the Elite XI feature. fantasyfootballfix.com have gathered 11 elite managers with 74 top 10k and 55 top 5k finishes, each manager has a bio so you can only follow the managers that suit your style, or you can follow them as a collective with the ‘Consensus XI’. The combined 11 managed to score a total of 111 points in gameweek 1, so if a casual had signed up to fix and taken some advice from the experts, they’d have been very close to 100 and hit the tops of their own mini-leagues!
You can set up push notifications to come through on your phone when the managers make a transfer, this will insight throughout the season on their FPL strategies. If all of the Elite XI managers get rid of Luke Shaw for example, and bring in Lucas Digne, I will look to use the Fix Stats tool to analyse whether there is a reason as to why they’ve made that move and then decide whether to follow suite.
I’ve promoted Fix for several years, before joining the team and I will continue to do so for years into the future. If you’re struggling in your mini-league or want to break into the top 10/100k for the first time, this is the website for you! You will not regret signing up for fantasyfootballfix.com