One of the most important decisions made by players of the Premier League’s popular official fantasy football game is when to play their chips to maximise their advantage.
Fantasy Premier League pits friends, families, colleagues and fans against one another and ruthless deployment of chips can be a crucial differentiator in the long slog of the FPL season.
Wasting a Free Hit, Triple Captain, Bench Boost or Wildcard is a familiar frustration for FPL players but now they have a chip that offers the help of a real Premier League manager in the second half of the season.
How does the FPL Assistant Manager chip work?
The Assistant Manager chip gives FPL players the chance to add one of the Premier League’s 20 real-life managers to their squad as their assistant manager.
By activating the chip and picking an assistant, players will score points based on the wins, draws, goals and clean sheets of the assistant manager’s real Premier League team for three consecutive gameweeks.
The points available couldn’t be simpler. A win for the assistant manager’s team is worth 6 points and a draw is worth 3 points. Each goal scored wins 1 point and a clean sheet wins 2 points.
So, players who opt for Arne Slot as soon as the Assistant Manager chip is available will collect points based on Liverpool’s Premier League fixtures against Bournemouth, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Manchester City.
But he’ll cost you – there’s an Assistant Manager price range between £0.5m and £1.5m and that will come from the existing budget, so there’s a need to free up the funds before playing the new chip.
If the Reds were to win all three of those matches, his FPL bosses around the world would pick up 18 points for the wins, a minimum of 3 points for goals and maybe some clean sheet points along the way.
Slot must be the obvious choice, then? Well, not necessarily.
FPL players will be looking for double gameweeks, in which some of the Premier League teams play an extra game midweek, to turn three matches into four for their chosen assistant managers. Keeping a keen eye on possible double gameweeks later in the season is a must.
There’s also a ‘table bonus’ that offers the opportunity for FPL players to find a differentiator.
If the assistant manager they choose plays a team five or more places higher in the Premier League table, a win becomes worth 16 points and a draw yields 8 points.
When can you play the Assistant Manager chip?
The Assistant Manager chip will be available from Gameweek 24, which begins on Saturday 1st February 2025, and can be played at any point between then and the end of the Premier League season.
As ever, only one chip can be played at a time. The other chips will be locked out for the three gameweeks in which the Assistant Manager chip is active.
For the truly bold FPL tacticians out there, there’s an extra opportunity to identify an advantage in the schedule by using a free transfer within those three gameweeks to swap one assistant manager for another.
If the real-world club is the one that makes the move to sack a manager, FPL players will continue to receive points from the club whoever takes charge of the matches while the chip is in play.
