Rotation During The Festive Fixtures – Fantasy Premier League Tips

Leading up to Christmas, the Premier League gameweeks come at us in a flash. We had our first midweek set of fixtures a couple of weeks ago and there are many more to come this month. With the sheer amount of matches taking place, Premier League managers need to rotate their respected sides, and that rotation has already shown signs of beginning. This means Fantasy Premier League managers may become frustrated with the managers as they cause havoc with their team selections.

The manager who is most unpopular for his rotation strategy is Man City boss Pep Guardiola, or Fraudiola as he has been called by many FPL managers so far this campaign. His chopping and changing of Sergio Aguero and Gabriel Jesus is the biggest concern and the absences of Leroy Sane and Raheem Sterling also being an annoying re-occurrence. It isn’t just Guardiola giving FPL managers a hard time as Jurgen Klopp has made the most changes to his starting eleven in the Premier League. Despite this, I believe Liverpool players can still be the way to go as the players can still make a big impact off the bench, as Salah proved in their game against Stoke.

Double Gameweek

On a lighter note, FPL managers were greeted on Monday with the news that the first double gameweek (DGW) of the season will be at the beginning of January. Both Spurs and West Ham have two fixtures in gameweek 22, making their players very tempting to bring in.

Swansea vs Spurs
West Ham vs West Brom
Spurs vs West Ham

However, both of these London clubs do miss out completely in gameweek 21. A certain Harry Kane will have many of his owners hitting the triple captain chip as his other game is away to current bottom side, Swansea. That said, the other popular option is to use the free hit chip, as gameweek 22 coincides with Chelsea’s toughest fixture (vs Arsenal) in an 11 game run.

Cup Fixtures

Seven out of the twenty Premier League teams are still in the Carabao Cup, meaning their schedules will be even more clogged up than the others. The following fixtures will be played on the 18th/19th December, between gameweek 18 and gameweek 19:

Arsenal vs West Ham
Leicester City vs Manchester City
Chelsea vs Bournemouth
Bristol City vs Manchester United

Fixture Congestion

Based on the current fixtures, its clear that Arsenal have the longest amount of time to recover in-between fixtures, with Chelsea close behind them. The other teams have relatively similar time to recover in-between fixtures, however the fixture tracker below will show the congested fixture list as it currently stands.

General Advice

The clubs with arguably the easiest set of fixtures over the Festive break are Crystal Palace, Spurs, Watford and West Brom. In addition to this, and as mentioned above, Chelsea have just one match against a top six side in their next 12 games, so players like Eden Hazard and Alvaro Morata will certainly catch the eye of many FPL managers. A piece of advice that I will give you which has been uttered across the FPL community is that you need to get all of your 15 players to be regular starters for their respective clubs as you never know when a player may suddenly get left out.

Written by Harry Clark (@HarryClark67)

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