Guide · 5 min read

Free transfers, rolling them, and when a hit pays for itself

Transfers are the only decision you make every single week, and the hit is the only time the game charges you points for anything. Both deserve a clearer rule than "it felt right".

The rules, as the game applies them

You get one free transfer each gameweek. If you don't use it, it rolls over, and you can keep rolling until you're holding five; the game's settings cap the bank at four extra on top of the standard one. Every transfer beyond your free ones costs 4 points, deducted from that gameweek's score before it's added to your total.

Those numbers aren't from memory. In this season's data, a manager who made five transfers in gameweek 3 with one free transfer available was charged 16 points: four hits at 4 each. Another who made no transfers in gameweek 2 made two in gameweek 3 for nothing. The rules work exactly as stated.

The one detail worth checking for yourself is what a Wildcard or Free Hit does to your bank. Look at the free-transfer count the game shows you the week after playing one, rather than assuming.

What a hit really costs

A hit is a fixed 4-point charge to bring forward a change you could have made for free later. So the right question is never "is this player better?" It's "will the incoming player outscore the outgoing one by more than 4 over the time I hold him, and would waiting a week have cost me more than 4?"

Take a midfielder you expect to average 3 a week, and a replacement you expect to average 5. The gain is 2 a week, so the hit pays back in two gameweeks; over six weeks you're 8 points up. Now make the replacement's edge half a point a week. The hit takes eight weeks to pay back, and you've almost certainly moved him on before then. Most hits that feel obvious on a Friday night are the second kind.

Why rolling matters

A saved transfer is worth exactly the hit it saves you later: 4 points. Rolling one week means you can fix two problems next week for free, or absorb an injury without a hit. Rolling two or three gives you the room to restructure, swapping a defender and a forward to fund a premium, say, without a Wildcard.

The limit is five, and the value of each additional saved transfer falls as you approach it. Holding five with nothing to do is capital sitting idle: you can't roll a sixth, so the fifth is use-it-or-lose-it every week. Two or three in the bank is the useful range. Five is a sign you've stopped looking at your team.

The forced transfer

Injuries and suspensions force the decision. The arithmetic is the same, but the baseline changes. If your injured starter would be replaced by an auto-sub who scores 2, and the replacement you'd buy scores 5, the gap is 3 a week and a hit pays back in under two. If the auto-sub is a decent player who'd score 4 anyway, the gap is 1 and the hit is a waste: hold the injured player, play the sub, and use the free transfer next week.

Long-term injuries are the exception. A player out for two months is dead money in a fifteen-man squad and worth moving even at a hit, because every week you hold him is a week your bench is a player short.

Two moves this week, or one now and one next?

Suppose you want to make two changes and have one free transfer. Option one: both now, at a 4-point hit. Option two: one now, one next week, for nothing. The difference is what the second incoming player scores this week compared with the one he replaces. If that gap is bigger than 4, a starter replacing someone who won't play, say, take the hit. If it's a couple of points, wait. In most weeks it's a couple of points.

The trap

The single most common bad transfer is buying the player who scored 15 last week. His 15 went to the people who already owned him. What you're buying is what he does next, and one big week is weak evidence about that. The same trap runs the other way: selling a good player after one blank, at a hit, to buy someone whose one good week you just watched. Two hits in successive weeks is 8 points, a full gameweek's edge in a close mini-league, spent chasing noise.

The test is simple: would you still make this transfer if the two players' last scores were swapped? If not, you're reacting to points that are already banked for someone else.

When a Wildcard beats hits

If putting your team right would take three or more transfers beyond your free ones, you're looking at 12 points or more in hits. A Wildcard does the same job for nothing. The first-half Wildcard has to be used by gameweek 19 in any case, so if your team is broken in October, that's exactly what it's for. The windows are in Every FPL chip explained.

Reading your own record

Over a season, add up your hits. A manager who takes 40 points of hits needs those transfers to have returned more than 40 points over the alternatives just to break even. Most managers never check. The Rivalry Report does: its transfer efficiency category totals what each manager has paid in hits and how disciplined they've been with the free ones. And because selling prices decide how much your transfers can actually achieve, Price rises, falls and the sell-on fee is the companion to this one.

Compare two managers and see whose transfers have actually been paying for themselves.