Week 26 – The influence of the Cup on TFF

A bumper week of action with Premier League games mid-week followed by Cup fixtures at the weekend. With less player rotation for the Cup games, hopefully that has led to a lot of points scored for your teams ?!

The Team of the Week is dominated by players from double game week teams, the exception being the goal scoring and clean sheeting defenders from Chelsea, L. Colwill (£3.1m) and M. Cucurella (£3.4m).

Regulars in the Team of the Season, M. Sels (£3.2m) and D. Munoz (£2.7m) also feature alongside Star Man of the Week – B. Fernandes (£6.4m).

M. Sels (£3.2m) returns to the, money no object Team of the Season as does K. Mitoma (£3.6m) and E. Haaland (£8.5m).

Simply swapping out Haaland for C. Wood (£3.5m) gives us an affordable and available Team of the Season:-

although, watch out for some injury doubts at time of writing surrounding K. Mitoma (£3.6m) and to a lesser extent, A. Isak (£5.1m) :-

Injury news is updated twice weekly on the Player Stats Portal and by combining with the % Picked By column, is a useful guide for injuries and suspensions affecting the most popular TFF players.

Gaining extra points via the match schedule is always an important part to playing TFF, our TFF specific Fixture ticker helps with this:-

NB – the Cup quarter finals now scheduled in for Game Week 29, with an extra double game week 32 for Newcastle and Palace and with a blank game week 28 forthcoming for those two aswell as Villa and Liverpool, this should be taken into strong consideration for any team tweaks.

For example, Liverpool and Newcastle have two blank game-weeks – 28 and 29. Only Fulham and the top 4 on the above, Bournemouth, Brighton, City and Forest have the full compliment of 8 fixtures over the next 7 game-weeks. That’s 2 extra games for these 5 clubs compared to Liverpool who have only 6 games !

Of course you’d be a brave person to take out M. Salah (£7.2m) permanently 😆 but, as Liverpool play Southampton early in game week 27 and face Everton later in game week 30 one could get 3 extra games from a team such as Bournemouth (I think actually maybe only Bournemouth are still in the Cup and play after Liverpool in week 27 and before Liverpool in Week 30)

Let us therefore focus on the best players to pick from Bournemouth, Brighton, City and Forest :-

Only Brighton players are showing in the Six Week Form Rank although a handful of City and Bournemouth players appear on the 4 and 6 week views.

With a longer time period considered, back to Game Week 20, we get more options with midfielders and attackers dominating the table; standing out at the top are J. Kluivert (£2.7m), C. Wood (£3.5m), K. Mitoma (£3.6m) *- injury doubt and even P. Foden (£5.4m) – all four have scored >= 48 points over the last 7 weeks.

A. Semenyo (£2.8m) and D. Ouattara (£3.1m) from Bournemouth, E. Haaland (£8.5m) of City, M. Gibbs-White (£3.4m) of Forest, G. Rutter (£3.5m) and Y. Minteh (£2.9m) of Brighton are in the next bracket of >= 38 points. An old TFF favourite, K. De Bruyne (£6.7m) may even come into your thinking…

When it comes to the Defence, surprisingly the four Goalkeepers lead the way with perhaps attacking defenders M. Kerkez (£2.5m) and J. Gvardiol (£4.5m) the only defenders worthy of consideration from these clubs…

Indeed, Bournemouth appear in 3 of the top 5 metrics, as do City and with City jumping 3 places higher on the overall Team Points this week, perhaps it is to players from these two clubs (who face each other in the Cup Quarter Finals on Week 29!), Bournemouth and City we should place our faith….?