2021/22 season of Fantasy Premier League is now over and it is time to look back, review it, and learn from mistakes in order to improve our FPL skills in the next season.
That’s why in this article, we will look at the best FPL team from 2021/22 season – the top-scoring combination of players respecting the budget and other constraints.
Basically, the team (a zombie team) you would have picked at the start of the season and scored the maximum number of points possible.
The best (top-scoring) FPL team 2021/22
First, some math introduction to this problem.
From a mathematical point of view, Fantasy Premier League is an optimization task.
We have our cost function (points scored by a combination of 11 players), and constraints (budget constraint, formation constraints, teams’ constraints).
Our goal is, of course, to maximize the value of our cost function – to maximize the points scored by our FPL team respecting the constraints.
So, let’s look at which combination of 11 players within the budget scored the most points last season.
- We used a genetic algorithm to find a solution.
- We were looking for 11 players in any eligible formation within the budget of 82.5 million – so the bench is 4-4.5-4.5-4.5.
- We used prices from the beginning of the 2021/22 season.
- We did not consider any substitutions and transfers.
- Only one player was captain for the whole season
So, no transfers, no substitutions and no captaincy changes for this team.
Here is the top-scoring combination of players, the best FPL team of 2021/22 season:
- Lloris (5,5m);
- TAA (7,5m), Cancelo (6m), Robertson (7m), Laporte (5,5m)
- Salah (12,5m) (C), Son (10,5m), Bowen (6,5m), Maddison (7m), Saka (6,5)
- Pukki (6m)
If you have picked this team at the beginning of the season, you would get 2409 points at the end of the season without transfers, without subs, and with Mahamed Salah captain every gameweek.
Lessons learned
The most important knowledge from the top-scoring team:
- 4-5-1 formation was the best formation – heavy defence, premium goalkeeper, but no value up-front
- The optimal team has two heavy hitters (10 million +) players – so it is something to have in mind when choosing the structure for the next season
- Expensive defenders (Robbo, TAA, Cancelo) were worth it
- No premium attacker, they just scored too low points in comparison with much cheaper defenders
Before the start of the season, we could have predicted (to some extent) that Salah, Son, TAA, Robbo, Cancelo, Lloris were going to be great picks for our FPL teams.
But it was unlikely that we would have successfully predicted that Maddsion, Saka, Pukki, Bowen, Laporte were going to have such an outstanding season.
The lesson learned here is: pick 5 or 6 “safe-heaven” players before the start of the season. And then, built a team around them during the season, when cheap options emerge.
The best FPL team with new prices
Now, let’s try something different.
The team above was the best team for the last season.
But what about this season? Let’s change players’ prices to new prices from the 2022/23 season.
How will the best team change? Which players will keep their place despite different price tags?
Here is the best team with new prices:
Lessons learned
The total number of points of this FPL team with the new team is only 2305 points (104 points less than the tam above with previous season prices).
- Big at the back is a formation to consider for 2022/23 FPL season
- Premium defenders are greater value than premium forwards
- Salah is out and Son is the “perma captain” and the most expensive asset
- Instead of Salah, we have three Liverpool defenders in the best team of 2021/22 season
- Money are spread into sub 8,5m players + Son (so apart of Son, this team does not have other captaincy options)
- Lloris, TAA, Cancelo, Robertson, Son, Bowen, Maddison, Saka kept their place despite price rises
The best FPL team from previous seasons
We did similar optimization at the end of 2020/21 and 2018/19 season as well, so feel free to compare best FPL teams and conclusions from those optimizations:
Conclusion
Optimization can help us to find the best solution for our FPL teams. It shows us how we should spread our money around, which formation we should use, how many heavy hitters we should field, and most importantly, how the structure of our FPL teams should look like.
Use the knowledge from the best FPL team of the 2021/22 season when tinkering about your team for GW1 of the next season.
