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CATCH_UP again, and by a wider margin than the mode name usually implies: z=1.775 blended, driven by Engleski Dopisnik (weight 3.0) sitting 172 points behind leader Samo Jako with 34 gameweeks still to play. XcentricIT, the weight-1.0 company league, is a closer fight — 3rd of 3, 105 behind. The knobs that follow are what that blend actually asked for: a differential captain policy capped at 35% ownership, and no hit tolerance held in reserve.

Three moves, no hits, and one re-plan. The optimizer's first pass, locked at 05:18Z, sold Gyökeres and Lacroix — both flagged fall-risk in that night's price-watch report — for Thiago and Botman, plus Cherki for Mbeumo. The dry-run two minutes later came back HTTP 400 transfer_element_in_price_mismatch: Thiago's price had moved 7.9 → 7.8 in the 01:30Z reprice, because the plan had been built off a bootstrap snapshot that was itself several hours stale (only my-team gets refetched at the top of --phase plan, not bootstrap). Refetching and re-running found the identical three moves at the same +20.05-point horizon EV, 0.1 cheaper on the buy — relocked at 05:20:06Z, the original archived at data/decisions/gw5_superseded.json. All three incoming players clear the rotation gate outright (p_start 0.98 / 0.98 / 0.96 against the 0.60 floor), and with zero repricing windows left before the 17:30Z deadline there was no further drift risk to survive.

The plan

• Hits: 0 | Chip: none | Strategy mode: CATCH_UP

The table says what the decision intended: zero hits. FPL's live /my-team/ record for this entry, checked at submission and rechecked eleven hours later, says something else — transfers: {limit: 3, made: 3, cost: 4}. The free-transfer arithmetic that checked out for GW2 (limit 1, made 2, cost 4, matching (made-limit)×4) gives zero here, not four. Either the free-transfer count entering this gameweek was really 2 rather than 3, or FPL is charging a hit this plan never asked to take. It is unresolved as written — the gameweek's own entry history doesn't carry event 5 yet — and it is being flagged rather than guessed at.

Saka keeps the armband, and it is a differential pick on purpose: 12.8% owned in our own leagues against João Pedro's 98.2% and Haaland's 79.7% — the two players CATCH_UP's own knobs (differential_max_eo 0.35) rule out captaining precisely because everyone else already has them. B.Fernandes is vice. Beto stays in the dead bench slot: he signed for Fiorentina permanently on an official flag this week (status=u), and swapping him for a live fifth bench player was worth roughly 1.35 points of horizon EV for a slot that plays zero minutes either way — not worth a transfer.

Squad

Watchlist & risks

THE FIELD, again: João Pedro (98.2%) and Haaland (79.7%) are still players in our own leagues that we do not own, alongside Szoboszlai (59.8%) and five more above 30% — the same shape of gap GW3 first flagged, not yet closed, and it is as much of the 172-point deficit's arithmetic as any single transfer. We also sit at the three-player cap for Manchester United, which forecloses adding from there without a sale first.

Price-fall risk tonight, per price_watch's momentum table: Beto -28,714 (irrelevant, the dead slot), Thiago -17,567 (bought seven hours ago, on the survivable side of tonight so far), Keane -10,236. Rogers is the one rising, +12,853. None of it changes anything before the 17:30Z deadline — it is Wednesday night's problem, not tonight's.

And the one still open: the transfers.cost anomaly above. If it settles as a real -4 once GW5's own entry history appears post-lockdown, it is worth adding the check the decision file itself asks for — comparing live transfers.cost against the decision's declared hits×4 at Gate C, so a mismatch like this cannot pass readback silently again.