If you struggle to choose the right players for your FPL bench, never know how much to spend on these players, whether they are really needed and just generally don’t have a strategy, you’re in the right place. This article will teach you how to choose a bench in FPL.

This year in particular, it’s becoming ever so difficult as there are so many pricey players. We all want to get our hands on them which makes it easy to neglect the bench. This leads to us managers falling into a trap of resorting to filling our FPL bench with the cheapest players we can find.

I decided to look into best strategies and see which players are optimal to use for the bench this season. After all, we come across any shock rotations (I’m looking at you Pep) or any other reason why a player you expected to start doesn’t, your bench can really save you.

How does the bench work?

Firstly, I’ll clear up how the FPL bench works.

So, when you create your squad, you have £100m to choose 15 players. 11 of these will be your team who will score you points. The other 4 will be left for the bench. Unless you use the bench boost chip, which you can use once a season and enables your bench players to score points.

If a player in your starting 11 doesn’t play that game week, a player from your bench will automatically replace this player.

Which player form the bench replaces the player that didn’t play?

Your bench is ordered. GK, 1, 2, 3. This is the priority order so it is important to keep an eye on. How it works is if one of your starting 11 doesn’t play, FPL looks toward the player in bench position 1. If he played, he will get automatically swapped in. If he didn’t play, FPL will then look to bench position 2 and so on.

If more than one of your starting 11 didn’t play, the same rule also applies. Due to this, it’s important to ensure you have the player you think will score the most points on your bench in position 1, which is the furthest to the left.

Subs Strategy

So when choosing your bench, you might have questions like “how much should I spend on my bench?” or “should all of my bench players be scoring points each week?”

To answer these, I will go through each bench position below, and give you a run down of what type of player you should be looking for, and a few suggestions for each.

Sub 1

Your first substitute is obviously your most important. Therefore, he should have the most spent on him our of all your subs. However, this amount largely depends on the amount of budget you have remaining, once you have decided on your starting 11.

A good rule is to make sure, at very least, one of your subs is a guaranteed starter. This way, they will always score you, at least, one or two points. After all, they may not be needed whatsoever.

For sub 1, I recommend a player that is likely to score points from his team’s overall performance. You’re likely not going to have the budget to have a match winner, or a key player on your bench, so anyone who can pop up with a goal, or score clean sheet points is a bonus. Therefore, defenders are always good for this. No matter how they perform, if they play at least 60 minutes and don’t concede a goal, they will get that well earned +4 points.

I’d aim to spend around £5-6m on a sub 1. This is to ensure he is a starter and you might get lucky that he chips in with some extra points too.

Players I would recommend for a sub 1 this season are:

  • Armstrong – £5.5m
  • Gomez – £5.5m
  • Ayling – £4.5m
  • Pieters – £4.5m

All of these players are likely to start pretty much every match for their teams this season. They also all have potential to either score a goal, get an assist and/or get clean sheet points.

Sub 2

Sub 2 and 3 are less important. It is unlikely that they will be needed (as long as you have put some effort into keeping up with your starting 11).

Sub 2 ideally needs to be a starter every game, if not most. It doesn’t really matter whether they are likely to score any extra points. With the likeliness of you needing them combined with the small chance of them scoring the points in that game week, it’s mostly down to luck as to whether or not both will happen.

You ideally wanting to be spending as little as possible on these players. Ideally £4.5m or less, but ensuring they are starting, at least, most of the time.

Sub 2 player recommendations:

  • Ayling – £4.5m
  • Pieters – £4.5m
  • Walker-Peters – £4.5m
  • Taylor (Burnley) – £4.5m

Sub 3

Your sub 3, in all honestly, doesn’t really matter. Ideally you want them get some minutes. However, it’s very rare this player will ever get into your team. Except of course if you use the bench boost.

These players are likely to be the cheapest in their position. However, there are still some gems that can be found down in these low price brackets. Just look at Lundstram!

Here are my recommendations for sub 3’s:

  • Wickham – £4.5m
  • Brewster – £4.5m (if he moves on loan)
  • Ferguson – £4.0m
  • Mitchell – £4.0m

Sub goalkeeper

Now, the goalkeeper sub can be a complex one. I recommend you read my Premium vs Budget Goalkeepers article to get a grasp on goalkeeper strategy in FPL this season.

Basically, your goalkeeper sub depends on your strategy. If you chose to go with a premium goal keeper, such as Alisson or Ederson, these should be ‘set and forget’ players. This means you should put them in your squad at the start of the season, leave them in there and stick with them through their ups and downs. In this case, it doesn’t matter who your sub will be, as they will never play. You should just pick a £4.0 goalkeeper and be done with it.

However, if you employ the strategy of choosing 2 goalkeepers which you will rotate throughout the season, your sub selection becomes much more complex. If this is the case, I recommend you keep a close eye on upcoming fixtures and plan your goalkeeper accordingly. You will be prioritising the goal keeper with the easiest fixture, meaning the other goal keeper will be on the bench for that week. It’s wise to plan these fixtures in advance so you can hopefully combine the fixtures of two goalkeepers to get a good string of matches together. For example, in the Premium vs Budget Goalkeepers article, I mentioned the fixtures of Ryan and McCarthy and how, combined, they will have pretty easy start to the season.

More Tips

I hope you found this useful and now have more of an understanding on how you should be choosing your bench in FPL. For more tips, either visit the blog to see the latest articles, or follow me on Instagram!