5 FPL Hacks That The Pros Won’t Tell You About

Whether you’re a fantasy football addict or a casual manager, here are some useful hacks for your benefit before Gameweek 1:

Free Resources

Nowadays there are plenty of sophisticated FPL-related tools and services that are available on a subscription basis. With that said, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are plenty of useful resources available for FPL managers for free, such as websites that have:

· Average player positioning

· Goal scoring records v teams

· Heatmaps

· npxG and xA stats

· Referee stats

To see where you can access any of the aforementioned stats (and more), check out this tweet.

FPL Calendar Smartphone Sync

No doubt that 99.9% of the times you will know when your FPL team must be ready by for a given Gameweek. But a quick Twitter search for “missed the FPL deadline” will show that this is more common than you may think, especially when there is a Friday Night game. The chances of it being missed increase further if you’re located in a time zone that is significantly behind or ahead of BST/GMT time. Thankfully help is at hand. To sync the calendar click here and select the FPL option. This may also work with computer-based calendars too. Try it. What’s the worst that can happen? At least you won’t forget the deadline. On a side note - it doesn't automatically update (be aware in the event of postponements, etc.)

FPLHINTS Magazine

In case you’re not aware, at the end of June, a digital fantasy football magazine was created from scratch in 30 days and was released with tons of pre-season content. The writers involved come from different backgrounds from all around the world and have over a hundred years of aggregated fantasy sport experience. The magazine can be accessed as a non-download or in a downloadable (eBook friendly) format. It won’t cost you a penny to read. And why should it? After all, the best things in life are for free!

Boosting your chances of winning mini-league prizes

During this time of the year, your timelines are littered with posts encouraging you to join mini-leagues with large cash prizes. Do think twice about joining them and be pragmatic. The fact of the matter is that a lot of them already have tens of thousands of entrants and therefore your chances of winning them are practically near to zero if we’re being honest (regardless of whether you have a good FPL record or not). So what can you do instead? Surely it makes more sense to join smaller free-to-enter mini-leagues that offer prizes? Of course it does! A basic Twitter search of “FPL mini-league prize” is a good starting point to see what’s available on a smaller scale. You should be able to decipher niche mini-leagues with prizes fairly easily. Quick disclaimer – Lots may offer a prize but not all will deliver on it if you win so just be aware before you join.

Don’t wait until May to win something

I’ve left the best till last. I find it frustrating that you have to wait 38 Gameweeks before you’re able to find out if you were successful in winning anything from your mini-leagues. That in itself can be draining and stressful in equal measure. Why wait until May when you can potentially win something within the first few days of the new season? Perfect Picks is a free to enter predictor game. It has a good interface and is easy to play. I’m running a one-week only prediction contest for the opening Premier League games. You won't be competing against thousands of people. The person who wins my contest outright with the most accurate predictions will win £50. You can enter FPLHINTS' bespoke competition by following these simple instructions.