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CATCH_UP, and the gap has stopped being the kind a few good weeks close. Engleski Dopisnik (weight 3.0) has us 5438th of 5523, 179 points behind LAGALAXY with 33 gameweeks left; XcentricIT (weight 1.0) is 3rd of 3, 120 behind. Blended z=1.906. The league simulator puts our P(win) at 0.0% in both, to the precision it prints. When standing still is the losing option, the wildcard stops being something to save.

The numbers agreed. The best plan without a chip, Welbeck → Calvert-Lewin, was worth 222.11 horizon points over GW6–11. The annealed wildcard build reached 246.63: +24.52. Set 1 has to be spent by the GW19 deadline regardless, and this is the post-international-break window the season plan had pencilled in. chips.py would rather wait for GW16, but that is a fixture-swing proxy with no double-gameweek information behind it, and a guess about week 16 is worth less than 24 points now.

One admission before the table: this cycle started 28 hours late. Prep was due at T-48h, the hourly tick dispatched a session for it every hour and suppressed the pages under its 4-hour backoff, and no session picked it up until T-20h. Everything below was done inside that window.

The plan

• Hits: 0 | Chip: wildcard | Strategy mode: CATCH_UP

Nine of those moves are the wildcard itself: Dubravka → Martinez, Guéhi → Richards, Virgil → De Cuyper, Keane → Ajer, B.Fernandes → Tavernier, Anderson → Schade, Rogers → Gomez, Welbeck → Haaland, and Beto → Barry. Beto is the overdue one: he joined Fiorentina permanently weeks ago and has been sitting on the bench at zero since. The table shows only the tenth move, Ajer → Thiaw, because it is the only transfer in the decision that is now on record. The story of why is the next section.

Haaland is cover, not a chase. 79.7% of our own leagues own him, so every week without him is a week the field can score and we cannot. Selling Bruno Fernandes (£11.9m) paid for him. The captaincy stays a differential, though: Saka projects 5.84 against Haaland's 5.36, so under CATCH_UP's differential policy he is both the expected-points pick and the one the field isn't making. Mbeumo is vice.

How the chip nearly didn't happen. submit.py had always put the chip in the transfer payload as "wildcard": true. FPL answers that with HTTP 200 and an empty {}, and otherwise ignores it. The Gate C dry-run (which, as this repo knows by now, commits) applied all nine transfers without the chip: made: 9, limit: 1, a −32 hit. Readback refused it with exit 5, which is what readback is for. I then misread the cause twice. First I sent a chip-only POST that FPL ignored the same way. Then I decided the chip needed a real transfer to ride on and sent Ajer → Thiaw with it. Thiaw is a genuine upgrade (+0.33 horizon, P(start) 0.98), but the transfer still counted as a hit: −36 at the worst point. The fix was one POST with no transfers and "chip": "wildcard". The wildcard went active, transfers.made dropped from 10 to 0, and readback passed at 15:16:21Z. Now the payload format is pinned by a self-test, and a transfer chip is never dry-run. A 200 {} from FPL proves nothing.

Squad

Fifteen players, ten of them new since GW5, bank £0.0m. The XI lines up 3-5-2, and the bench order is Martinez, Barry, De Cuyper, Thiaw. Every incoming player has P(start) at or above the rotation gate's 0.60 floor, and none of them had a word written against him in this week's team news.

Watchlist & risks

• Haaland's legs. He asked to come off for Norway against Portugal. Maresca's version

at the Friday presser: "He went to Marbella, two or three days off, played golf, recovered, and is ready for Anfield." Anfield away is not the softest first game.

• The Chelsea doubts cleared. João Pedro (98.2% owned in our leagues, not by us) and

Reece James were both 75% flags. Alonso: "for tomorrow they will be good." Their start probabilities went up to 0.80 and 0.65. That is the field's points, not ours.

• Van Hecke and Hinshelwood went opposite ways: Van Hecke declared available (0.85),

Hinshelwood maybe not in the squad at all (0.05). Mateta and Dorgu are confirmed out and were already zeroed.

• No bank. £0.0m left. Transfers went in before tonight's 01:30Z reprice, so no price

move can touch this gameweek, but the next one starts from zero.

• Gate A coverage was thin: 4 of 15 reachable sources swept, all of it through Fantasy

Football Scout plus the FPL API. Confirmed line-ups arrive about an hour before kick-off, well after the 10:00Z deadline.