Complete guide: Your Free Hit 13 team should feel uncomfortable

Building a Free Hit team for Gameweek 13

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Gameweek 13 is one of the most action-packed this FPL season has seen — there’s a good chance that you identified it as the best time to play your Free Hit, Wildcard, or Triple Captain chip.

According to a poll in our premium members' Q&A, a hefty 71% of you plan to use a chip this week. And in nearly 70% of cases, the goal is to build a Free Hit team*.

*Don’t worry, wildcarders, an article for you will be out later this week.

Throughout my life, I have invested a lot of time in building my Daily Fantasy Sports teams and strategising to win real-money tournaments with them. And a Free Hit team in FPL is essentially a DFS team, which is why I love creating them.

The good old days of large prize pools and overlays in these multi-entry Weekly Monster tournaments on Fanteam are long gone…

While building a Wildcard team involves planning, zooming out, and considering a broader range of future fixtures for your desired players, building a Free Hit squad is all about the immediate impact (duh).

You have all the matchups in front of you, and you’re looking for edges that might be hidden in plain sight. It certainly doesn’t involve less analysis. It’s just a different kind of analysis.

As I often emphasise, a single week of football involves so much variance that it can get ugly real quick. This season, it’s even more so.

FPL towers introduced two sets of usual chips, with the first batch to play before Gameweek 19, meaning you’re often replacing a good team with… another good team.

But that’s the game we’re playing right now.

At the same time, you can:

• Choose the best shield picks

• Maximise your exposure to good match-ups

• Secure players you wouldn’t normally be able to get

• Fully utilise positional and tactical advantages

• Target key injuries and suspensions

• Exploit synergies between two or more players

• Use teams with recent strong performances

• And much more…

This allows you to create wonderful drafts.

Without further ado, let’s do this.

Part 1: Always start with Haaland essentials

Erling Haaland.

No matter which chip you use, it’s always him.

This time, Manchester City are playing Leeds at home, and regardless of which prediction model you use to aid your decision-making process, all of them will have him as the highest projected point-scorer. Or at least should have.

The Norwegian has taken 4.30 shots, with a non-penalty xG of 0.91 and a post-shot xG of 1.02 per 90 minutes (according to StatsBomb data via Fantasyfootballscout.com).

Haaland’s shot map so far. A thing of beauty… (fotmob.com)

Sure, there’s some anticipated regression compared to the first 6 GWs of the season happening, but it’s laughably small. Additionally, in the 2023/2024 season, he wasn’t far off this level. Also, you don’t really need to worry about it when building the Free Hit team.

What you should focus on is how to maximise the gains from him. Aka, if Haaland scores, who else is likely to be involved?

There are two main candidates:

Jérémy Doku has already created 2.55 expected goals for Haaland in 771 minutes of play.

Rayan Cherki has already created 1.50 expected goals for Haaland in just 331 minutes of play.

You can see that the rate is higher for Cherki, but it’s:

• nothing too dramatic

• still a low sample size

While both players are exceptional creators, Doku is essentially unplayable this season, and he has already demonstrated this several times. He excels in advanced goal probability added models, which assess how his passes and runs/dribbles increase the team’s chances of scoring.

In other words, each game, he gets the ball into dangerous areas, and he does so in absurd volumes. Erling Haaland is always present in those areas, whether he runs in behind or is in the box against a settled block.

The trade-off is Doku’s low volume of shots. Cherki has historically been a greater goal threat, but he has not yet taken many (almost any) dangerous shots from central areas, as he is still adapting to the new league. I wouldn’t see goal threat as a decisive factor in this case.

The French is more of a differential, but hey, a Free Hit itself is a differential, and only 7.7% of managers currently own Doku, so there's no need to go overboard.

One thing that could put me off Doku and make me go for Cherki would be a noticeable positional weakness to target against Leeds. But there isn’t anything obvious at the moment.

The key point is that Leeds have recently allowed enough good chances to be confident about City picks. Over the season, they are ranked 14th for xG conceded, and 13th in the last six games, with only Wolves conceding more goals. Struggling Lucas Perri hasn’t met expectations so far, that’s for sure.

My ideal FH team would also include a third City player. And because there’s no one with a proper goal threat other than Haaland, and the midfield is generally pretty tricky in terms of minutes, I’d opt for Nico O’Reilly.

O’Reilly’s created chances (theanalyst.com)

That guy basically lives in the cutback zone, which is the most dangerous area you can pass from to teammates in front of the goal.

He already has 4 passes that directly lead to a shot from this space. You can also add his 8 shots inside the box, and 12 overall.

Proper threat.

The small concern is that Pep might start Rayan Aït-Nouri* from the beginning, or that the Englishman's minutes will be limited. However, I would take the risk because this is a prime example of a fun and high-upside FH pick. Also, it’s an early kick-off, so we could get some leaks.

* But RAN starting against Leverkusen on Tuesday, with O’Reilly rested, is certainly a positive.

While Leeds can produce quite a good defensive display against weaker opponents, they have been inconsistent in attack. In some games, they created very little, so the City’s clean sheet prospects aren’t too bad either.

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room…