Update (Saturday 12 September, morning — a few hours before the 13:30 deadline)
Two new flags, both on players owned by more than 10% of managers.
Pedro Porro (TOT, 10.9% owned) is likely out. Roberto De Zerbi said of him: “Pedro Porro felt a small muscular problem. We have to see tomorrow if he’s available or not, but in this moment I don’t want to take any risks.” Destiny Udogie is also reported out of the Everton game — Tottenham lose both full-backs at once. Better news for Spurs owners: James Maddison is available, and Kudus is close to a return.
Luke Shaw (MUN, 12.1%) faces a late fitness test. He came off against Everton with cramp and missed the following match, where Patrick Dorgu replaced him — and Dorgu was named man of the match. Michael Carrick says Shaw has a chance of featuring in Sunday’s derby, though whether he starts is another matter. At £4.4m the downside is small, but it is worth having someone on your bench who is certain to play.
Gakpo: the situation has not improved. Saturday reports suggest the Dutchman may not return to the matchday squad until next week, with predicted line-ups putting Victor Muñoz in his place — assuming Barcola, also a doubt, does not play. The 75% flag remains. Gakpo is still among the most-bought players of the week (650,000). Our advice is unchanged: if you do not own him, do not buy him today.
Two players have moved from “doubtful” to “unavailable”: Nathan Collins (BRE) — calf, no return date, and Moisés Caicedo (CHE) — calf, back around 18 September. Neither will play.
Confirmed: O’Reilly is clear — his annotation disappeared entirely and has not come back.
Prices have accelerated: 95 changes became 118, 100 of them falls. The risers are the same players the crowd is buying: Calafiori, Rogers, Cherki, Palmer, Isak, De Cuyper, Ødegaard and Wissa.
The rest of the article — including the captaincy ranking and the derby argument — still stands.
Update (Friday 11 September, after the press conferences)
O’Reilly has lost his flag. City manager Enzo Maresca confirmed that Nico O’Reilly is fully available after his back problem, and the game has removed the annotation (his status moved from “75% chance” to fully fit). This is a player owned by 13.9% of managers whom more than 429,000 people sold this week. If you own him and were planning a transfer purely because of the injury, that reason has just disappeared. Note that City do not play until Sunday.
Gakpo: the manager does not know whether he will play. Asked directly about Saturday, Andoni Iraola said: “I don’t know. I hope so, but I don’t know.” The issue is in the adductors — by his manager’s account it is not a proper injury, but the Dutchman finished his last match with niggles in both, and the situation was only going to be reassessed before Saturday. The 75% flag remains in the game, and Gakpo is still the second most-bought player of the week (617,000). The point from the main article stands, in an even stronger form: buying him today means buying blind.
Doku will miss the derby — Maresca said the winger needs more recovery time after his calf injury, and the game has moved his expected return to around 20 September. For FPL, that mostly signals how thin City’s wide options are, which supports Semenyo’s minutes.
Mosquera’s flag has worsened — the Arsenal defender has dropped from a 75% to a 50% chance of playing (3.1% ownership). Otherwise Arsenal have no surprises: Ben White is fine despite Wednesday’s scare, Saliba remains out, and Timber is back in training and close to a return.
Beyond that, not a single price has moved since this morning and no new injury has appeared. The rest of the article stands.
The Gameweek 4 deadline falls on Saturday 12 September at 13:30 UK time — not Friday evening, as usual. The first five matches kick off at 15:00, ninety minutes later. That is the shortest gap between deadline and first whistle this season.
Here is what changed in the last 24 hours, plus one thing no fixture table will show you: the two players half the game captains are playing against each other.
Haaland and Bruno are in the same match. That is a problem, not an opportunity
On Sunday at 16:30, Manchester United host Manchester City. The official difficulty of that fixture is 4 out of 5 for both sides — the hardest match of the round for either team.
Playing in it: Erling Haaland (owned by 71.3% of managers) and Bruno Fernandes (44.8%). Those are the two most-selected players in the game after João Pedro. Most of the league will put the armband on one of them.
Our captaincy model ranks them seventh and eighth out of eight. Here is the full list:
| # | Player | Price | Rating | Risk | Upside | Fixture | Ownership |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rogers (CHE) | £7.6m | 90 | 35 | 89 | home, HUL (2) | 30.6% |
| 2 | Szoboszlai (LIV) | £7.0m | 90 | 35 | 88 | home, FUL (2) | 38.4% |
| 3 | Saka (ARS) | £9.5m | 89 | 42 | 78 | away, SUN (4) | 11.4% |
| 4 | João Pedro (CHE) | £7.7m | 89 | 35 | 86 | home, HUL (2) | 72.8% |
| 5 | Mitchell (CRY) | £4.5m | 89 | 35 | 85 | home, IPS (3) | 6.1% |
| 6 | Rice (ARS) | £7.4m | 88 | 42 | 70 | away, SUN (4) | 13.4% |
| 7 | Haaland (MCI) | £15.5m | 88 | 50 | 69 | away, MUN (4) | 71.3% |
| 8 | B. Fernandes (MUN) | £12.0m | 88 | 50 | 70 | home, MCI (4) | 44.8% |
Risk and upside are our own measures. Risk combines minutes certainty, fitness and fixture difficulty — lower is better. Upside is a points ceiling built from xG, xA and the ICT index, adjusted for how easy the opponent is.
Haaland and Bruno carry the highest risk in the whole eight (50 each) and the lowest ceilings. Not because they are poor players — both rate 88 overall with a “buy” verdict. The reason is simple: the derby is the only fixture in the round where both teams face difficulty 4. Rogers and Szoboszlai play at home against opponents rated 2.
This is not a call to take the armband off Haaland. At 71% ownership, captaining him is safe in league terms — if he scores, you lose ground to nobody. But if you are hunting an edge over the crowd, this week it sits with Chelsea and Liverpool, not Manchester.
610,000 managers are buying a flagged player
Cody Gakpo is the second most-bought player of the week — 610,000 transfers in. His price has risen to £7.2m. After 11 points last gameweek and with a home fixture against Fulham (difficulty 2), it looks like an obvious move.
The problem: Gakpo carries a “thigh injury — 75% chance of playing” flag. He sat out Wednesday’s Champions League tie with Atlético — as we wrote yesterday, he was withdrawn as a precaution, and manager Iraola said he could be back for Saturday. “Could” is not “will”.
Liverpool kick off at 15:00, ninety minutes after the deadline. Team news lands around 14:00 — after transfers close. You are buying blind.
Our rating for Gakpo is 87 with a “buy” verdict — the model values him highly because his underlying numbers are excellent. But that rating dropped from 90 purely because of the flag, and the flag is all the model knows: it does not read press conferences and has no idea what the manager said on Thursday. If Gakpo plays, the rating recovers on its own.
Practically: if you do not own him, wait. One gameweek is not a season, and £7.2m tied up in a player who might watch from the bench hurts more than a 0.1 price rise.
Bruno is the most-sold player — and this time the crowd has a case
Bruno Fernandes has left 429,000 squads this week. That is the most in the game.
Before Gameweek 2 we described exactly the same picture and defended him — 165,000 managers were selling, and he answered with a hat-trick and 23 points. Today we are not repeating that argument, because the situation is different.
Back then United were at home to Ipswich (difficulty 2). Now they host Manchester City in a difficulty 4 fixture. Selling Bruno before the derby is not a reaction to one bad score — it is a fixture decision, and it makes sense. Our 88 “buy” rating describes the player, not this particular Saturday.
The same logic covers Mbeumo (312,000 sales, rated 88) and United’s cheap defence — Shaw and Maguire are leaving squads in bulk too.
Isak: this one we got wrong, and the model has just admitted it
Since August we have described Alexander Isak as a premium trap. Our rating then was 60 — verdict “risky”.
In Gameweek 3, Isak scored 13 points. He now has 23 for the season, and 493,000 managers bought him this week. Our rating has climbed from 60 to 75 and the verdict has changed to “hold”.
This is not a manual correction — the model recalculates itself as minutes and points accumulate. We said it already in our Gameweek 3 review and we will say it again: on Isak, the market was right and we were not. A rating of 75 is still below several cheaper forwards, but the direction is unambiguous.
Who else carries a flag
| Player | Club | Ownership | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| O’Reilly | MCI | 14.1% | back, 75% chance |
| Gakpo | LIV | 13.7% | thigh, 75% chance |
| Cash | AVL | 6.6% | muscular, 75% |
| Dedić | NEW | 3.3% | hamstring, 75% |
| Watkins | AVL | 3.2% | joined Al Hilal |
| Mosquera | ARS | 3.1% | muscular, 75% |
| Mateta | CRY | 1.9% | back around 11 October |
| Collins | BRE | 1.7% | calf, only 25% chance |
| Rodon | LEE | 1.5% | back 21 November |
Two things stand out. O’Reilly at 14.1% ownership is the most-selected flagged player in the game — and he plays in Sunday’s derby, so you cannot check team news before you commit either. 429,000 managers have already sold him.
And second: Watkins still sits in 3.2% of squads despite leaving the league for Al Hilal. That is a guaranteed zero every gameweek. If you own him, this is the transfer to make today.
The full list of flags, updated automatically, is in our Injury Centre.
Prices: 95 changes, 81 of them down
Since Gameweek 3 closed, prices have moved sharply — 95 changes in the database. Tellingly, 81 of them were falls: the effect of mass transfers after a round where the global average was just 36 points and plenty of managers rebuilt.
The risers are mostly the players the crowd is buying: Calafiori (£5.8m), Rogers (£7.6m), Cherki (£7.8m), Palmer (£9.7m), Isak (£9.1m), Gakpo (£7.2m) and Ødegaard (£6.7m).
A practical note: 0.1 of price is 0.05 of profit when you sell. It is not worth making a transfer purely to beat a rise — least of all for a flagged player.
Differentials, if you want an edge
Players rated 84 or higher, owned by fewer than 6% of managers:
| Player | Club | Price | Rating | Ownership | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tavernier | BOU | £6.0m | 87 | 3.4% | 21 |
| Dewsbury-Hall | EVE | £6.5m | 87 | 4.5% | 15 |
| Le Fée | SUN | £5.9m | 87 | 4.8% | 13 |
| Barnes | NEW | £6.0m | 86 | 2.1% | 17 |
| Scott | BOU | £6.1m | 85 | 5.0% | 24 |
| Stach | LEE | £6.0m | 85 | 2.8% | 19 |
| Bogle | LEE | £4.5m | 84 | 1.7% | 22 |
| Thiaw | NEW | £5.0m | 84 | 2.1% | 8 |
Two Bournemouth names side by side is no accident — Scott already has 24 points at 5% ownership, Tavernier 21 at 3.4%. Bournemouth are at home to Brentford (difficulty 3). Also worth a look is Mitchell at £4.5m: a defender rated 89, fifth in our captaincy ranking, owned by just 6.1%.
The Gameweek 4 fixtures
| Fixture | Day and time (UK) | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Aston Villa v Nottingham Forest | Sat 15:00 | 3 / 4 |
| Bournemouth v Brentford | Sat 15:00 | 3 / 3 |
| Chelsea v Hull | Sat 15:00 | 2 / 4 |
| Crystal Palace v Ipswich | Sat 15:00 | 2 / 3 |
| Liverpool v Fulham | Sat 15:00 | 2 / 4 |
| Tottenham v Everton | Sat 17:30 | 3 / 3 |
| Sunderland v Arsenal | Sat 20:00 | 4 / 3 |
| Coventry v Brighton | Sun 14:00 | 2 / 2 |
| Man Utd v Man City | Sun 16:30 | 4 / 4 |
| Leeds v Newcastle | Mon 20:00 | 2 / 3 |
Five minutes before the deadline
- Check whether Watkins is still in your squad — he has left the league and will never score again.
- Count how many players you have in Sunday’s derby. If it is more than three, a large slice of your gameweek rides on one hard fixture.
- If your captain is Haaland or Bruno, accept knowingly that it is the toughest match of the round. If you want an alternative, Rogers and Szoboszlai are home to weaker opposition.
- Set a vice-captain from a different match at a different time than your captain.
- Do not buy a 75% flagged player whose match starts at 15:00. You will not see the team sheet before the deadline.
- Check your bench order — five matches at the same time means auto-substitutions will fire all at once.
Our Recommended Squad for Gameweek 4 updates automatically, Captain Picks shows the full risk and upside breakdown, and the AI Rankings carry ratings for every player. Fixture difficulty is in the Fixture Ticker.
If you want to compare your score with other readers, join our mini league — code 3ix1cw. You can join at any point in the season.
Ratings and numbers come from our AI model and official game data, read on 11 September. Ownership and prices change daily — check the current state before you decide. We explain the methodology in full on How our AI Rating works. This article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, using our own engine’s data and the official Fantasy Premier League API.