Week 17 – Nottingham Forest march on

Well, the festive EPL fixtures certainly provided gifts to Fantasy Football gamers, especially if you owned Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and Newcastle players !

This season’s Santa Claus himself, M. Salah (£7.2m) is Star Player of the Week AND Star Player of the Season for the second week running !! 😯

He’s joined by his Liverpool team-mates C. Jones (£3.5m), A. Mac Allister (£4.2m) and C. Gakpo (£5.3m). None of these three join Mo in the Team of the Season but, may well be considerations for your teams.

The 6 man GK and defence this week is dominated by the cheap Notts Forest defenders (although Liverpool defenders also scored well) with M. Sels (£3.2m), N. Milenkovic (£2.7m) and O. Aina (£2.4m) entering the, otherwise unchanged, Team of the Season.

Not much more to say about Mo Salah other than to wonder why he’s still only the second most popular player ! :-

with A. Isak (£5.1m) transferred in by +11% of gamers this week, most likely as a wise choice Saka replacement :-

This season’s Team of the Season continues to go ‘over-budget’, previous TFF season’s I don’t recall this as being an issue. This does say to me that the TFF game creators have priced the players better this year?

But, with this in mind I think a couple of enhancements could be made to the Team of the Season to make it more useful, let me know in Comments if you like this idea and I’ll potentially incorporate into the standard reports, as always accessible via the Player Stats Portal :-

Above is a ‘within budget’ Team of the Season and I’ve marked any players with injury or suspension doubts in Red. It differs and is probably more useful than the standard Team of the Season by replacing very expensive players such as Haaland and Alexander-Arnold with far cheaper, better value alternatives such as L. Hall (£2.7m) and M. Cunha (£3.6m)

That said, with Saka, Bowen and Cunha all doubts at time of writing, here is another ‘within budget’ but also without risk ! Team of the Season:-

An additional defender in T. Alexander-Arnold (£5.2m) instead of Bowen, B. Fernandes (£6.4m) replaces Saka and C. Wood (£3.5m) replaces Cunha.

Of course forthcoming fixtures should be kept in mind as well as very recent form e.g. J. Maddison (£5.2m) and B. Fernandes (£6.4m) don’t appear prominently on recent form guides:-

We’ve picked out the likes of M. Rogers (£2.9m), A. Gordon (£4.7m), J. Murphy (£2.9m) and M. Gibbs-White (£3.4m) as potential cheaper and better alternatives to the likes of Maddison and Fernandes…

Finally, looking at forthcoming fixture difficulty, REMEMBER the above is from the FPL game so doesn’t include FA Cup games and also NB – Arsenal and Brentford also play each other in game week 18 in the Telegraph game.

Liverpool in particular would seem to be the team to pile into (double game-week for them and Everton in Week 24) but, no reason to avoid the highlighted Forest, Newcastle or Villa players based on the above.

So final analysis in what is turning into a bumper festive blog 😂 – lets examine if there are any Liverpool players to add to the obvious picks of M. Salah (£7.2m) and the defenders:-

Only T. Alexander-Arnold (£5.2m) and C. Gakpo (£5.3m) have three ticks in the above although Gakpo’s is only for discipline so can probably be disregarded (* – TransparaTech will not be held liable if Gakpo gets sent off his next game ! 😂)

The form furthers the case of Gakpo and possibly adds A. Mac Allister (£4.2m) into the mix.

In final conclusion though, it is really only Salah and TAA jumping out from Liverpool, the cheaper midfielders may be worth consideration but, Gakpo has a lot of competition in the striker stakes from other teams, so…..

Happy New Year – and wishing you all lots of luck for your fantasy teams in 2025 !! 😊