The most common mistake in a first squad is not picking a bad player. It is picking fifteen players you have heard of, spending £96m of the budget on eleven of them, and putting four people who will never play a minute on the bench.
Start with the league you actually watch
Take six or seven players from the league you follow closely. You already know who starts, who takes the penalties and who gets rested. That knowledge is worth more than any spreadsheet, and it means most of your squad needs no research at all.
Then buy the two best players you can afford, wherever they are
Premium players are premium because they return points at a rate nobody else does. Two of them, from any league, is the right number for a first squad — one is too cautious and three leaves the other twelve places underfunded.
Fill the rest with players who start
Minutes are the whole game. Each league page lists its regular starters under £5.5m — that is where your bench and your cheap defenders come from. A bench of four players who never play is a bench that cannot rescue you when someone is injured on a Saturday morning.
Set the bench order and name a vice-captain
Two thirty-second jobs that people skip. Your bench order decides who comes on automatically; your vice-captain saves your week when your captain is a late withdrawal. Neither costs anything and both will eventually save you a gameweek. How the substitutions actually fire →