Fantasy Premier League Tips: What is the new Mystery Chip, and how has the BPS changed? | OneFootball

Fantasy Premier League

Salah should benefit greatly from this season's BPS changes

Fantasy Premier League expert and football tipster Holly Shand is back to look through all the new rules ahead of the 2024/25 FPL season.

Five free transfers

In a groundbreaking fundamental change to Fantasy Premier League, managers will now be able to accumulate up to five free transfers, a significant increase from the two free transfers which has been in place for the last twenty years.

This means that if you do forget to set your team for a couple of weeks, when you do log back in you'll have a number of banked transfers to completely change up your squad and catch up your fantasy rivals.

In addition, these banked transfers won't be lost when activating the Free Hit or Wildcard chips. The days of being reluctant to wildcard due to having two free transfers are over, opening up the different strategies in play.

Having up to five banked transfers will also benefit those managers who like to plan their moves rigorously, including responding to positive and negative fixture runs, as well as exploring more advanced chip strategies.

The Mystery Chip

Speaking of chips - changes to the scheduling of FA Cup rounds for 2024/25 means that we are anticipating a reduced number of blank and double gameweeks for this campaign. This will open up a wider variety for when to play the existing chips.

We now also know that there's a new mystery chip coming in January, which does make me think that saving the other chip to have a full picture of strategy in the second half of the season will be the smart play.

This new chip could be the return of All Out Attack, allowing managers to play a 2-5-3 formation with all eight attackers. This chip was initially brought in for 2015/16 but was replaced two seasons later by the Free Hit.

We've seen in other fantasy formats chips that allow managers to pick a team with unlimited budget or captain the highest-scoring player of week, which also have the potential to be included when the mystery is unveiled.

Bonus Point System Changes

The new campaign also brings a change to the Bonus Points System (BPS), where the top three players in a match receive bonus points - three points to the highest-scoring player, two to the second best and one to the third.

Attacking players are rewarded additional points here, with one bonus point for a foul won and two bonus points for a shot on target. Erling Haaland (£15.0m) and Mohamed Salah (£12.5m) are the key beneficiaries for the changes to shots on target, which somewhat justifies Haaland's £1.0m price increase.

When it comes to additional bonus points for fouls won, Bukayo Saka (£10.0m) and Anthony Gordon (£7.5m) were among the higher ranking players for these metrics last season, as were some more defensive midfielders. Newcastle United's Bruno Guimares (£6.5m) won the most fouls - 108.

Goalkeepers and defenders are now penalised for conceding a goal, while a penalty save for a goalkeeper reduces from 15 to 9BPS. There are some positives though, with a goal-line clearance set to be worth three in the bonus points system.

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