FPL Fortress

On paper, this upcoming gameweek seems like it’ll be the last relatively calm one before the inevitable chaos of the tail end of the season ensues. By examining what the best course of action might be for our own teams, we touch on key topics that will hopefully be relevant for many FPL managers right now, such as whether it’s time to move from Darwin/Solanke to Højlund/Isak/Jackson (yes, Nicolas...

As the title of this episode conveys, we are concerned this gameweek with what words rhyme with Romeo’s close friend in Shakespeare’s classic. The answer we present: TIOotIO (pronounced “ti-OO-shee-oh”). Humor us and take a moment to think about what that might stand for—yes, it’s an acronym. Got a guess? Well, if you landed on “The Ins and Outs of the Ins and Outs,” that you’d be right! And we’re...

The greater good has rarely outweighed my own self-interest. Specificity breeds universality. The ends justify the means. Are you confused because this sounds an awful lot like a philosophy podcast? No, this is still the FPL Fortress! And in fact, we here at the Fortress pride ourselves in forging connections between the ideas we learn in the classroom and the teams we so painstakingly manage in t...

In this latest episode of the FPL Fortress, many exciting things happen: Jacob gets bamboozled, Jiayang successfully lands two puns in a row on the spot, and both work together to contemplate the strategy of the Gameweek 30/31 Wildcard that many managers are considering. It’s particularly exciting because Jiayang is visiting Georgetown—so the recording is finally being done in the same room, with...

A common piece of advice: trust your intuition. But when your intuition tells you that transferring Haaland out for Carlton Morris is an insane thing to do, don’t trust your intuition. Seriously, there’s a larger point here—even when a certain action seems insane at first glance, it can be very useful to create some distance between yourself and the action in order to approach it from a more logic...

Now that this round of the FA Cup has finished, the Gameweek 29 fixtures are finally confirmed—and boy, they do not look particularly exciting. In this episode, we conduct a thorough investigation on what the best course of action is to prepare for the blank, covering transfer strategies both going into and coming out of the blank and the most important players to own by the time March 16th rolls...

FPL is a game that’s often characterized by the feeling of disappointment. Cold, hard, and unadulterated disappointment. And yet, before every seemingly juicy double gameweek, it seems like we FPL managers have a genuine reason to be hopeful. Double Gameweek 25 was one of those gameweeks—how exciting was it that Man City and Liverpool, two of the best teams in the league, would have two nice fixtu...

In this episode, we focus exclusively on Liverpool, Manchester City, and Arsenal, the three teams that comprise the current top three of the Premier League—as such, it should come as little surprise that they also offer some of the best assets in FPL. Players from Liverpool and Man City are particularly hot property this week, given their juicy upcoming double gameweeks. Salah’s impending return a...

With GW 25 and GW 28 finally confirmed to be double gameweeks and a clearer picture emerging overall of the remainder of the season, it finally seems like there are some real choices to be made for FPL managers—choices that, with strategic planning, can result in massive rank gains. To that end, we try to approach the four available chips from a new angle—instead of looking at which gameweek would...

Gameweek 22 was full of fun moments, with Haaland completely scuffing his lines (a robot will inevitably be a little rusty after a period of disuse, after all), Maupay taking the absolute mickey out of Maddison, and Elijah Anuoluwapo Oluwaferanmi Oluwatomi Oluwalana Ayomikulehin Adebayo dethroning Addji Keaninkin Marc-Israel Guéhi in his as the player with the best name in the Premier League. Look...

The most stretched-out gameweek in recent memory has bored us to the point of making Starting XIs consisting of animals. Yes, that’s right—Jacob and Jiayang spend about 20 minutes putting together the perfect Animal XI. And to be honest, we don’t see anyone getting past this team—the footballing world should be grateful it doesn’t actually exist, because it would no doubt walk the Champions League...

Breaks in the Premier League never come to pass calmly. Our teams just always seem to get derailed—this time, it’s injuries to Bowen, Trent, and of course Charlie Taylor, coupled with the departure of Salah and Son that had been imminent—and as FPL managers, we have to navigate our way through these trainwrecks. After reviewing the key points in Gameweek 20, we spend the bulk of this episode addre...

I can scarcely believe that this is our last episode in 2023, but here we are! Jiayang and Jacob conduct reviews of Chelsea and Man City respectively, with both landing on a hopeful outlook for the future (though Chelsea might be going through yet another false dawn, whereas City’s hope seems a lot more grounded). We also put Newcastle under strict scrutiny—has the Saudi money finally met its matc...

All any FPL manager wants for Christmas is a captaincy haul—obviously. Oh, but will Santa come and realize this dream of ours? In this Christmas Eve episode of the FPL Fortress, we conduct a deep dive into decision-making methodology, mainly through the lens of the weekly captaincy decision. Are we all becoming part of the hive mind? Are we victims of groupthink, or even GUILTY OF groupthink? Or m...

It almost seems like this week’s episode of the FPL Fortress should be an episode of Sheldon Cooper’s “Fun With Flags” instead. Jiayang’s team is filled with five flags, which includes all four different flag colors—yes, we are in the thick of holiday season, but this is one instance in which we don’t hope to see festive colors. Our Dilemma Deliberations this week focuses on one binary: playing th...

We’ve got a special double episode coming your way today, given that the first midweek gameweek is fast approaching—a sign of the busy holiday season ahead (which of course could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how your team performs). To help you navigate the imminent fixture congestion, we spend the majority of this episode discussing which one of the top FPL assets at the moment can be c...

With Man City vs. Liverpool looming over us in under 60 hours, it’s time for FPL managers to jump right back into the thick of things, especially after the long international break. First, we review the 4-4 thriller between Chelsea and City, reflecting on both funny moments (Mudryk, Jackson, Palmer…Chelsea have quite a few jokesters on the team) and tactical insights (why can’t City defend in tran...

How much has to go wrong for you to concede three goals to Nicolas Jackson? The answer: two disallowed goals (albeit rightly so), two red cards (absolutely rightly deserved), two injuries (wholly undeserved), and a frankly ridiculous high line (this one’s on Ange). The star of this episode is no doubt the London showdown between Spurs and Chelsea, which has, in recent times, become an instant clas...

It’s a (relatively) peaceful week in the FPL landscape this week. We still do our classic Gameweek Review and Captaincy segments this episode, but instead of the Dilemma Deliberations, we embark on a brief philosophical interlude regarding, among other things, Paul Tillich’s ontology of courage and Henri Bergson’s views on the connection between time and free will. We promise, it all connects back...

Considering the dramatic episode title, it may come as a surprise that the nature of the following 70 minutes is actually rather light-hearted. (Don’t worry—Jiayang does go off on a mini-tangent about the subtlety behind how French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre might view FPL managers’ decision to keep Haaland or not!) The bulk of this episode revolves around the nitty-gritty of Jiayang’s Wildca...

Today, we all witnessed the divinity of Daniel Johnson Burn, the lanky lad who just scored against PSG in the Champions League. To quote Newcastle’s Twitter admin: “Hang it in the Louvre.” Jacob has just activated his wildcard, and we spend this episode breaking down his current draft. Jiayang explains why Darwin is a personification of entropy, Jacob questions whether FPL managers should consider...

We’re back on the grind here at the Fortress—as college students now!—and, as always, there’s a ton to talk about this week in FPL. Our Gameweek 6 Review encompasses the high-quality North London Derby, the clash between mid-table mediocrity and a team that’s contending for Europe (Chelsea and Aston Villa—in that order), and the massacre that happened in Sheffield. In our Dilemma Deliberations, we...

This is our fourth season, and yet, for some reason or another, we still have yet to produce a Gameweek 1 episode. If we had, it’s obviously safe to say that anyone who listened to it would be ranked in the Top 1K right now, because our advice is just simply that good. In all seriousness though, it’s wonderful to be back for the 2023-24 season. Reviewing Gameweek 1, we debrief City's comfortab...

The final episode of the 2022/23 season on FPL Fortress is here! It’s been another wild ride—it always is, whenever FPL is involved, at least—and we want to find some sense of closure with it all. We’ve all faced so many stressful last-minute decisions right before the deadline, experienced so many memorable moments, both good and bad, and (hopefully) taken away so many valuable lessons for the fu...

This episode is all about narratives. After all, it's the last gameweek of the season—what better time to indulge ourselves? We deliberated over the best one-week punts, ranging from a Colombian troll to an English cult hero. The captaincy should probably go to Erling, but Jiayang is tempted by more alluring options (he is rather bullish about another 9-0 as a nice send-off for Southampton int...