Make goal projections the first port of call when choosing your FPL captain

Fantasy Premier League managers who have plied their trade for a number of seasons will be familiar with captaincy polls as well as actual ownership levels when it comes to choosing which player gets the honour of wearing that coveted gameweek armband.

Selecting the right player will have a significant impact on your overall performance throughout the course of a campaign, so, simply put, you need to get it right.

This means keeping speculative punts to the minimum and instead focusing on the player group that has the best chance of delivering.

Each week we highlight which players have the highest chances of being directly involved in goals, since goals and assists are the bread and butter of almost all fantasy football formats. These are based on the latest goal expectancies for the fixtures in question and the contribution a player is forecast to make to his team’s total.

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So, as we look ahead to GW10, you can see from the table above that there are 3 teams to focus on – Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City.

The Citizens have been on fire of late but those managers that plumped for Gabriel Jesus last week got badly burnt and the same could easily happen in GW10. 120 minutes of Caraboa Cup action for Sergio Agüero against Wolves on Wednesday only complicates matters further, so unless you have the inside track on what exactly Pep Guardiola intends to do, caution is strongly advised.

Alexandre Lacazette and Alexis Sánchez both feature in the Top 3 of the latest ‘Armband’ rankings for Gameweek 10 and they both look like serious options if you have them in your squad. For the first time this season, Arsene Wenger finally got to deploy the aforementioned duo and Mesut Özil in his starting front 3 and it worked a treat, with the Gunners completing a 5-2 demolition of Everton at Goodison Park. This weekend’s opponents Swansea City may have tightened up a bit at the back this season but only one side shipped more goals than the Welsh outfit last season, so Arsenal could be in for another field day on Saturday.

Liverpool have only won 1 of their last 6 Premier League games, raising question marks about their effectiveness at both ends of the pitch. The Reds’ poor defending has been well documented and it shows no sign of abating but it’s their finishing that is also being put under the microscope.

In the Oulala caption above, it can be seen that Liverpool have had the second highest number of total shots, bettered only by runaway leaders Manchester City but a conversion rate of just 8.33% simply isn’t good enough for a club with title aspirations.

Mo Salah is their top scorer this season with 5 goals but he has been far from convincing in front of goal, while Roberto Firmino will need to improve on the 2 Premier League goals he has scored to date, if he is to justify his position as Liverpool’s recognised number 9.

It promises to be another tough captaincy call – can Lacazette and Sánchez light up the Emirates?