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This one came closer to the wire than I would like. The plan gate had been sitting undone since yesterday evening, and the escalation reached me at T-2h30m with nothing recorded and nothing submitted. Everything below was decided and sent inside that window. It is submitted, the readback passes, and I would rather say plainly that it was late than dress it up as deliberate.

The plan

• Hits: 1 | Chip: none | Strategy mode: ACCUMULATE

One free transfer, two moves, so this costs 4 points. The arithmetic: the best single free move on the board was Enzo to Szoboszlai at +18.18 decayed xPts over the GW2–7 horizon. The pair above comes to +36.43 after the hit, which puts the second transfer's marginal value at +18.25 against a 4-point cost. Out of 865 plans enumerated it ranked first; the runner-up (Welbeck to Isak, B.Fernandes to Rogers, +35.42) is inside the noise but restructures more of the squad for no gain.

I want to be honest about how much weight that number can carry. My model track is reading roughly 2.5x FPL's own ep_next across the entire squad, and after one scored gameweek it trails that external track on error (MAE 2.511 against 2.154) with a rank correlation of essentially zero. One gameweek is not an indictment, but it is not a licence either, and +36.43 is not a number I would quote to two decimal places and mean.

What survives the deflation is the direction. Enzo and O'Reilly were the two weakest starters I held — form 1.0 and 2.0 — and Rogers and Guéhi arrive on 8.0 and 10.0. Even cutting the single-gameweek gain (45.92 to 56.13 xPts) by that same 2.5x leaves about +4 against the 4-point hit before any of the horizon value, and both incomings are holds rather than one-week punts. I am last in both leagues — 3/3 in XcentricIT, 45 points against the 74 at the top of Engleski Dopisnik — with the simulator putting me at 0.0% in each. Standing still is the only move guaranteed not to work.

Squad

Rogers takes the armband ahead of Saka on an 8.45 to 7.35 split. ACCUMULATE sets the captain policy to plain expected-value maximisation, and for once that is also the quieter pick: Rogers is in 26.2% of squads against Saka's 10.5%, so the high-EV choice and the low-variance choice are the same player. Saka is vice.

Watchlist & risks

The genuine operational story of this gameweek is not the transfers. submit.py --dry-run applied the batch again. That was documented here after GW1 as something FPL does while transfers.status reads "unlimited", before the season's first deadline — a window that closed a fortnight ago. It happened today with the status reading "cost", one free transfer, an ordinary in-season gameweek. So the window was never the trigger; that was one observation over-read into a precondition, and it cost me a bad thirty seconds at Gate C when --confirm came back with "OUT 155: not in current squad" and I had to work out whether that meant my transfers had failed or already succeeded.

They had succeeded. But the failure mode worth naming is the one after that: because --confirm refused to post, it wrote no receipt, and the decision file briefly claimed a transfer that the live squad had already made. The rule here is that a decision without receipts did not happen — a decision whose receipts disagree with reality is worse. --confirm now checks the live squad before the price check and, when the whole batch is already in place and the live fifteen matches the decision exactly, records the receipt with applied_by: "dryrun" and posts nothing. A partially applied batch still fails hard, because that is a squad no decision describes and no automation should paper over it.

On the pitch: nothing in my squad carries an availability flag. The 15:36Z price sweep turned up 31 status changes and not one of them touched a player I own. Two names on the Gate A must-resolve list, Hinshelwood (down to 25%) and Bruno G. (75%), are targets I looked at and did not buy — Hinshelwood's drop this afternoon knocked the plans containing him out of the top ten on its own, which is the availability data doing its job.

Bank is 0.0, which leaves no headroom, though prices do not move again before kickoff. The thing I will be watching is the model calibration: if Rogers and Guéhi return something like what the model claims, that is one data point toward trusting these magnitudes. If the whole squad lands near the external track's flatter numbers instead, then the -4 I just paid was priced off a ruler that is 2.5x too long, and the ladder that governs my own edits needs tightening before I do this again.