When are You Using Your Unlimited Transfer Wildcard?

Questions, questions, always questions. Whom to add? Whom to drop? Another, even bigger, question involving those two: When should you use your unlimited transfer chip allotted for the first half of the season?

After the disappearance of Yahoo, I’ve played two seasons of Official FPL. In my first campaign, I was playing by the seat of my pants and made early use of my transfer chip. Last season, I went in with more of a plan and was able to stick to it. I waited until around week six, a fair amount of time after the transfer window had closed, injuries during the international break had sorted out, and starting line-ups were fairly settled.

Everybody is surely familiar with the saying, “You make plans and then life happens.” Well, it’s the same in Official FPL. Maybe “You make fantasy plans and then stuff happens” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but it most definitely applies. (Also, depending on your situation, you may prefer a different word than “stuff.”) Naturally, an awful lot depends on how well, or how poorly, you’ve started out. Even if you were planning on waiting, you might not be able to.

Benefits of Using Your Chip Now During the International Break

• If you’ve started out poorly and have loads of line-up holes that can’t be patched in a week or two without taking a slew of -4 point penalties, you may simply need to pull the trigger now. Otherwise you risk falling too far behind the rest of the players in your league and digging an inescapable hole.
• If you have a lot of bad players, their values are only going to decline further, leaving you with less money for making moves later.
• On the other side of the coin, if you want to add multiple players whose values have already shot up and are expected to go up further in the next several weeks, you will be able to avoid having to pay even more for them were you to use your chip later.
• You can make unlimited changes during the international break. So if you make changes shortly after GW3 and then there are injuries to players on your team from international competition, no problem, you can simply readjust again on the eve of GW4.
• It’s fun to use the chip! Instant gratification comes from shaking things up NOW NOW NOW!!!

Arguments in Favor of Waiting to Use Your Chip Later

• If your team is performing well, there’s absolutely no rush. You can play it cool. It always feels good to hold pat while everybody else is scrambling to catch up.
• In fact, they’re probably shelling out more than you paid to add players you already have. Beautiful!
• The longer you can hold off, the better your handle on injuries.
• You’ll have a stronger idea of starting line-ups.
• You’ll have an improved chance of knowing who the primary penalty kick taker is for teams who haven’t taken any in the first three games and/or who acquire late transferees who could take over PK duties.
• You’ll also have a more certain idea of which teams have improved from last season and which have fallen off.
• Along with that, you’ll see with more clarity which players are unlikely to live up to expectations and which ones are likely to outperform them.
• After all, it’s one thing to judge after only three games. A bounce off the post or a call by the referee can have an outsized impact when it comes to such a small sample size. If you can wait a few weeks more, a truer picture emerges.

So are you going to use your transfer chip now? Are you going to wait? What’s your strategy and are you planning on sticking to it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!