The FPL Gameweek 1 draft: a £100.0m squad to start from

The Gameweek 1 deadline is 6:30pm on Friday 21 August, which gives you sixteen days. Every channel worth following has already put a first draft out, some of them twice, and once you line them up next to each other the overlap is hard to miss. Different presenters, different budgets left in the bank, mostly the same eleven names.

So here is that team, built only from players the drafts actually named. It costs exactly £100.0m and you can put it in right now.

The Man United block

Nearly every draft has gone at United’s opening run from some angle, and the fixtures explain why. Hull away, Ipswich at home, Everton away, and then Man City at Old Trafford in Gameweek 4. That is three weeks of good football followed by a wall, which is exactly the shape that suits an early wildcard.

Luke Shaw is the pick that keeps turning up. He is £4.5m, he played 38 out of 38 last season, and United’s expected clean sheet rate was 33% against an actual 21%, so there is a regression case sitting on top of the fixture case. One defender tier list worked upward from £4.0m and he was the first S tier name it reached. Maguire is the pricier version of the same bet at £5.0m with more chance of a goal, and Bruno Fernandes at £12.0m is barely a decision at all, with at least one draft already pencilling him in as the Gameweek 2 captain.

The Man City block

Haaland at £15.5m is the most expensive player in FPL history and 75% of teams have him anyway, as of 5 August. He was on 71% when Fantasy Football Scout recorded their first-draft show on 24 July, so the number is still climbing. The drafts going without him are not doing it to buy a better forward, they are doing it to afford Raya and a proper Arsenal defence.

Semenyo and Anderson alongside him is a triple-up one draft made explicitly, on the logic that City open with Bournemouth at home, Palace away and Coventry at home, and both midfielders should be nailed for minutes. Anderson at £6.5m is the one I would push hardest: if Rodri leaves, he inherits the holding role and the defensive contribution points that come with it.

What the crowd built instead

Ownership tells a slightly different story to the drafts. Here is the most-owned squad you can build inside the same £100.0m, with the percentage of teams that own each player as of 5 August. These numbers move every day, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a scoreboard.

Four names carry over untouched: Shaw, Bruno, Szoboszlai and the Haaland plus João Pedro front pairing. The gaps are where it gets interesting.

The crowd went	The drafts went	Why it matters
Raya £6.0m	Kinsky £4.5m	£1.5m freed for the outfield, and the tier lists rate the good 4.5s as close enough
Guéhi and Porro	Mosquera and Maguire	Both have a long World Cup summer behind them and competition waiting
Rogers £7.5m	Semenyo and Anderson	The crowd is buying a Chelsea attacker, the drafts are buying City minutes

The World Cup point is the one I would actually act on. Guéhi is 24% owned and comes back late from the tournament with Gvardiol already fit and training. Porro is 24% owned with a long summer behind him and an open question about whether Spurs line up in a back five. Two of the three most-owned defenders in the game have a Gameweek 1 minutes problem nobody can resolve from here.

The bits still unresolved

Cole Palmer at £9.5m is the genuine split. He is in a couple of drafts on the theory that a summer off and Xabi Alonso get him back to his best, and out of the rest because Morgan Rogers arrived at Chelsea for £117m off the back of 169 points and looks like the safer bet for the same money.

The 4.5 midfield slot on your bench is nobody’s favourite subject. One first-draft stream got there, said “Ryan Yates, whatever” and moved on, which is about the level of thought it deserves.

Build yours in a minute, not an evening

The AI workflows tab runs a season start build with you: pin the players you refuse to sell, set the budget and how much risk you want, and it fills the rest and tells you exactly what it gave up to make the money work. It is a lot quicker than doing the £100.0m arithmetic by hand for the fifth time.

Then, once the deadline goes, you can look up any FPL manager and find out whether your mini-league went consensus or went brave.