🃏 Gameweek 38 Chip Strategy

Chips are the most powerful tools in FPL and also the most reliably agonised over. Managers will spend three weeks debating the perfect moment to play a Wildcard, hold their nerve through two bad gameweeks, then deploy it on a Thursday night because they couldn’t take it anymore. This is not a strategy. This is grief.

Here’s what actually works.

The 2025/26 rule change you need to understand

Before anything else: this season changed the chip system in a way that caught a lot of managers off-guard. New for 2025/26, all four chips — Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost, and Triple Captain — can each be used twice per season, once in either half of the campaign. That’s eight chips across 38 gameweeks, which sounds generous until you learn the catch. DraftFC

The first set of chips expired at the Gameweek 19 deadline. Any unused chips from the first half were simply lost — they didn’t carry over. Managers who hoarded everything waiting for the perfect moment found out the hard way that the perfect moment had a deadline. The second set resets from GW20 onwards and runs to the end of the season. Fantasy Soccer Streams

If you’re reading this in the new season and haven’t absorbed this rule yet: plan to use your first-half chips before GW19. No exceptions.

The Wildcard — your most powerful reset

The Wildcard gives you unlimited free transfers for one gameweek while keeping your banked transfers intact. It’s a full squad rebuild, and the timing matters more than almost any other decision you’ll make.

The biggest mistake is using it on an average gameweek. Work backwards from the double gameweeks — once the DGW schedule is confirmed (usually February to March), plan which double gets your Bench Boost, and use your Wildcard to set up the squad for it. Fantasyfootballpundit

The temptation is to Wildcard when your team is bad. The right move is to Wildcard when your team is bad AND a fixture swing is coming. Wildcarding into a run of red fixtures is just rebuilding a mess into a different mess.

Data from hundreds of squads shows the same chip strategy keeps winning: Wildcard before the biggest fixture swing, Bench Boost the following double gameweek, Free Hit the blank. It’s not exciting advice. It wins leagues. Fantasy Football Scout

The Bench Boost — fill the bench first, then play it

The Bench Boost adds your four bench players’ scores to your weekly total. On a normal gameweek, your bench might contribute 8 to 12 points. In a double gameweek with four playing benchwarmers, that number can hit 30 or 40.

A popular and highly effective strategy is pairing the Bench Boost with the Wildcard. Wildcarding the week before a big double gameweek lets you set up a squad specifically designed to maximise it — ensuring all 15 players have fixtures, turning your bench into a genuine point-scoring engine rather than an afterthought. Fantasy Football Scout

One thing most managers get wrong: they play the Bench Boost without checking whether their bench players actually have games. Four bench players from teams with blanks is four wasted slots. Use the Bench Boost on the biggest double gameweek with the most doubled teams, and save the Triple Captain for a secondary double with a standout captain pick. Fantasyfootballpundit

The Triple Captain — ceiling, not safety

The Triple Captain triples your captain’s score instead of doubling it. In practice, this means the difference between a player scoring 16 points and them scoring 24. Used in the right gameweek, it’s the single biggest rank swing available.

Using Triple Captain in a double gameweek is almost always the superior choice — it gives your elite asset two chances to score, and the tripling compounds across both fixtures. Haaland with a brace across two home games against weak sides? That’s the dream. Haaland with one xG-heavy blank across two games? Less so. The Triple Captain has a high ceiling and a painful floor. Know which you’re accepting before you play it. Fantasy Football Scout

The Free Hit — for blanks, not panic

The Free Hit gives you unlimited transfers for one gameweek, but your squad reverts to its previous state afterwards. It’s a one-week punt, not a rebuild.

Its natural home is a blank gameweek, where several of your players have no fixture and you need a temporary squad just to field eleven. If there’s no clear blank gameweek, the Free Hit can also be used on a double gameweek where you want a one-week punt squad without committing to those players long-term. Fantasyfootballpundit

What it’s not for: selling three players who blanked last week and buying them back the week after. That’s a hit, not a Free Hit. The distinction matters.

The single most important principle

The average FPL team gains 49 points from optimal chip timing compared to using no chips at all. But the gap between the best and second-best chip strategy is only around 3 points. The gap between optimal and random is 20 to 30. Fantasy Football Scout

Getting it roughly right — Wildcard into a fixture swing, Bench Boost in a double, Free Hit in a blank, Triple Captain on a premium in a double — beats getting it perfectly wrong by a country mile. You don’t need to time every chip to the gameweek. You need to avoid playing the Bench Boost in a gameweek where half your bench doesn’t have a fixture, or Triple Captaining someone who then gets rested.

Plan the broad strokes in August. Adjust as the fixture schedule becomes clearer. And when the DGW announcements drop, move quickly — everyone else is looking at the same fixtures.

The chips won’t win you the league on their own. But they’re often what separates the managers who finish in the top 100k from the ones who look back in May wondering what happened.