Winner Erik Ibsen on why it’s important to have 15 regular starters to pick from, including two playable goalkeepers
The 2025/26 Fantasy Premier League champion Erik Ibsen is explaining the decisions that led him to glory, so others can learn from the best. Here, he reveals how to build the perfect squad.
Use all 15 players in your squad
It’s fair to say that Ibsen was taught a very valuable lesson in Gameweek 1, when his decision to go without both Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah backfired.
The Dane scored just 35 points and, with a ranking of around 8.9million, he immediately rectified that strategy by playing his Wildcard in Gameweek 2.
“I wanted to go against the pack,” Ibsen says. “But then after watching my Gameweek 1 score, I was like ‘Alright, forget going against the pack’.
“I tried to reinvent it a bit too much, I think, so I was quick to regress my tomfoolery.”
While prioritising a big-hitter such as Haaland up front was an obvious choice on his Wildcard, Ibsen avoided Chelsea forward Marc Guiu, who was highly-owned due to his low starting cost of £4.5m.
“I know a lot of people had Marc Guiu on the bench, even though he was never going to play,” Ibsen says.
“I was completely against that. I wanted to always have the option of trying to play a player because their fixture was good.”
By always having starters in his squad, Ibsen was able to adapt his tactics on a Gameweek-to-Gameweek basis and employed six of the eight formations available to Fantasy managers over his title-winning campaign.
He played with five at the back in just three Gameweeks, utilising a 5-3-2, while avoiding 5-2-3 and 5-4-1 altogether.
Although Ibsen used a three-man defence in 15 Gameweeks, it was a 4-4-2 set-up that was his favourite system.
“I’m balance-oriented,” says Ibsen. “And I think that’s when I then fall into the 4-4-2, because if I want to balance out the fixtures, I fall into that scenario.”
Ibsen’s formations
| Formation | No. of GWs used |
| 4-4-2 | 12 |
|---|---|
| 3-4-3 | 8 |
| 3-5-2 | 7 |
| 4-5-1, 4-3-3 | 4 |
| 5-3-2 | 3 |
Another intriguing feature of that Wildcard was Ibsen’s decision to spend £11.0m for his goalkeepers by owning Arsenal’s David Raya and Everton’s Jordan Pickford, who both cost £5.5m.
Ibsen also owned an Arsenal and Everton defender, allowing him to double up on their backlines according to the fixtures, and he rotated Raya and Pickford in and out of his starting line-up until he played his second Wildcard in Gameweek 32.
“I think people underestimate the ability to be able to rotate a goalkeeper,” he says. “Although I don’t think it necessarily helped this season as I think I benched more points than it did good.”
“But it was also another opportunity to gain team value by having two premiums.”
So while the Raya/Pickford pairing frustrated Ibsen, the intention was clearly to use his second goalkeeper slot to maximise the points potential of his squad, rather than have a “Set-and-forget” No 1 and a budget back-up to sit on the bench.
Indeed, a breakdown of Ibsen’s season shows that his winning margin of 38 points could have been far greater due to the performances of players he chose to bench instead of start.
In the 36 Gameweeks without his two Bench Boost chips active, the Dane had 20+ points sitting on his bench in SEVEN of them.
Such was the strength of his squad, even when selecting his line-up according to the fixtures, he still had more than 10 points on his bench in 23 of those 36 Gameweeks.
Ibsen’s bench points
| Points on bench | No. of Gameweeks |
| 0-9 | 13 |
|---|---|
| 10-14 | 13 |
| 15-19 | 3 |
| 20+ | 7 |
Boost your squad value with early-season transfers
Balancing your budget is vital at the start of the season, with managers given £100.0m for their squad of 15 players.
And Ibsen adopted an aggressive approach when it came to making transfers in the first half of 2025/26 in order to bring in key players who were rising in value.
“Early this season, I did make quite a few transfers because of price changes to gain an extra £0.1m,” Ibsen says.
“That’s a big thing that changes with the first half and the second half of the season. Because the first half is just increasing your value and the second half becomes ‘Who are the best picks?’, because you have so much value to play with.”
An assessment of his transfer strategy shows the FPL champion was a lot busier in the first half of the campaign.
In the 16 Gameweeks where he could have made a transfer, Ibsen chose to roll on just six occasions. But in the second half of the season, he rolled in nine of the 17 Gameweeks he could have made a transfer.
By prioritising building squad value early on, he was then able to be more patient in the latter stages of the season.
Although he bought and sold numerous players over the season, Ibsen made sure Brentford’s Igor Thiago never left his squad after buying him for just £6.0m in Gameweek 4.
“By the end of the season, he was £7.4m or something,” says Ibsen. “And it’s just insane price growth for that player.
“I’ll never sell him then, because then his value precedes the actual player performance.”
Next: FPL champion’s chip strategy