What is Statz?
At its core, Statz helps you make better, more informed decisions in fantasy football and sports betting.
Forget template Twitter threads and "hot picks" - this is about empowering you with intelligent data. Whether you're setting your FPL squad before Friday's deadline, hunting a differential nobody's talking about, or just trying to prove your mate wrong, Statz gives you the tools to back your instincts with real insight.
What you'll find on Statz for FPL:
- Season-long projections: every Premier League player's expected minutes and points, modelled across all 38 Gameweeks and updated continuously.
- Fixture Ticker: every club's run rated by the projections model - including clean-sheet chances for every match - so you attack the right fixtures.
- Predicted Line-ups: projected XIs for every Premier League club before each deadline.
- Filters and Tools: compare any two players side by side, find the form players, and slice the stats behind every pick.
Statz covers the Top 5 European Leagues plus the Champions League, and the FPL toolkit at statz.ai/fpl is built specifically for the game you're about to spend nine months obsessing over.
Why the early Gameweeks matter more than you think
Every FPL season is won in May and lost in August. Nobody lifts their mini-league trophy in Gameweek 3 - but plenty of managers spend the next nine months chasing a start they never recover from. And this season the early weeks are more treacherous than ever: a World Cup summer has left many of the league's biggest names short of pre-season minutes, and the gap between a good opening month and a bad one has rarely been wider.
The good news: a hot start isn't luck. It's information. Here are five things the sharpest managers are doing before Friday's 18:30 (BST) deadline - with the numbers behind them.
Getty Images1. Plan the first three Gameweeks, not the first one
Most managers build a team for Gameweek 1. Better managers build for the opening block - because fixtures, not form, are the only thing you actually know in August.
The Statz Fixture Ticker rates every club's run using the projections model rather than gut feel, and the opening spread is stark. Manchester United have the kindest start in the league - Hull away, Ipswich at home, Everton away - and the model gives them a 41% chance of a clean sheet on opening night at Hull, the highest of any Gameweek 1 fixture. Sunderland (Ipswich away, Fulham at home) and Manchester City (Bournemouth and Coventry at home either side of a trip to Palace) come next.
At the other end, Coventry face Arsenal away and Manchester City away in their first three, and Bournemouth's run is nearly as brutal. However much you like a player at those clubs, the schedule is against him for a month. Let someone else find out the hard way.
2. Minutes are the currency this August
The World Cup final was barely a month ago, and players who went deep in that tournament are starting this season on empty. That makes projected minutes - not last season's points - the number that matters most in the opening weeks.
The Statz Season Rankings model every player's expected minutes for all 38 Gameweeks before converting them into points. It's why the rankings throw up names the market hasn't caught up with: Dominik Szoboszlai is the model's third-best projected player in the game at just £7.0m, and Virgil van Dijk ranks fourth overall at £6.5m - a defender projected to outscore almost every midfielder in the game, because he plays every minute of every match.
The rule of thumb: in August, a nailed-on starter at £6.5m beats a rotation risk at £9.0m every single time.
Getty Images3. Respect the template - then pick one differential
Erling Haaland sits in 70.2% of squads at a record £15.5m, and the projections say the crowd is right: he's the model's top-projected player this season, and in the early weeks captaincy is where ranks are made. Going without the most-captained player in the game is not a strategy, it's a gamble with your whole season.
The skill is in the two or three picks after the template. This is where the projections earn their keep, because they surface high-projection, low-ownership players before their price starts climbing: Elliot Anderson is in fewer than one in ten squads at £6.5m, yet the model ranks him eighth-best in the entire game. Morgan Gibbs-White (11.9% owned) sits seventh. And at the deep end, Leeds' Anton Stach is owned by 1% of managers at £6.0m - with a top-12 projection.
One or two of those in a template-shaped squad is how 100k ranks get made in September.
4. Check the team news to avoid disappointment
Gameweek 1 line-ups are the biggest unknown of the season - new signings, World Cup fitness, five substitutes' worth of manager cold feet. Statz Team News publishes predicted line-ups for every Premier League club before each deadline, so you're not picking an £8.0m midfielder who starts on the bench.
Thirty seconds on the predicted XIs on Friday afternoon is worth more than three hours of podcasts.
Getty Images5. Don't panic in Gameweek 2
The final habit of fast starters is restraint. One bad opening weekend will tempt you into burning transfers - or worse, a wildcard - on ten days' evidence. The projections are built on far more than one Gameweek, and they barely move on a single result. If your player's underlying numbers are right, hold.
Before you make any early move, run it through the Statz comparison tool - two players side by side, projections, fixtures and form on one screen - and make the call with the season-long picture in front of you, not Saturday night's frustration.
Start the season with an edge
The managers at the top of your mini-league in May will be the ones who treated August like it mattered. Projections, fixtures, predicted line-ups and the stats behind every pick are all at statz.ai/fpl - free to explore, and updated continuously from the first whistle on Friday night.