How the reigning FPL champion beat 11 million players to take the top spot
Erik Ibsen, a 23-year-old Danish medical student and Everton supporter, told BBC Sport he had never played FPL before last season — yet beat roughly 11 million managers to finish first overall.
The reigning Fantasy Premier League champion doesn't sound like your typical mini-league winner. Erik Ibsen, a 23-year-old Danish medical student and Everton supporter, told BBC Sport he had never played FPL before last season — yet beat roughly 11 million managers to finish first overall. His approach, built on patience, a spread budget and a deliberate eye for defensive contribution points, offers a useful blueprint with the 2026-27 Gameweek One deadline approaching.
Build for 38 gameweeks, not one panic move
Ibsen told the BBC he was ranked around eight millionth after the opening week. What separated him from the thousands who quit in the same boat was a refusal to hit the nuclear button after one bad score. He treats the season as a marathon — reading the fixture swing three to five weeks ahead rather than chasing last weekend's numbers.
That mindset is worth borrowing. We see it every August: managers burn free transfers and chips chasing a red arrow, then watch the template players they dumped return to form by Gameweek Four. A bench built around the next fixture run, not the last result, is the difference between climbing and yo-yoing.
Spend smart, not heavy
Ibsen's draft strategy has been consistent since the season ended: value across the whole 15, not a luxury XI propped up by bench fodder. He points to budget enablers — the £5.5m midfielder who takes penalties, free-kicks and corners — as the engine that lets you afford the premiums. Pascal Gross of Brighton was his go-to example last term, a differential by stealth rather than by gamble.
The other lever is defensive contribution points. Ibsen says targeting defcon from Week One meant there was never a wipeout week on his scorecard — every lineup had something ticking over. If you're still drafting, defenders and midfielders with high tackle and interception volume deserve a second look, not just clean-sheet odds. Clean sheets are volatile; ball-winning volume is not.
Haaland is still the captain's best friend
Last season's top scorer is now the most expensive FPL asset ever at £15.5m, yet Ibsen is fitting him in around Florian Wirtz, Dominik Szoboszlai and João Pedro. The logic is simple: the rest of the pool is so cheap that you don't have to gut your squad to afford him, and he removes the Sunday morning captaincy headache entirely.
On the club-fandom dilemma — the one that quietly wrecks half the mini-leagues — Ibsen is blunt. He likes Thierno Barry as an Evertonian, but sharing minutes with Beto makes him a poor FPL pick. Pick with your head, support with your heart. The Athletic's FPL writers Holly Shand and Abdul Rehman will be running that same conversation all season, with a Gameweek One live Q&A set for 2pm to 3pm UK time on Friday before the 6:30pm deadline.
For managers who like to automate the research grind — tracking price changes, monitoring fixture runs, flagging transfer triggers — algorithmic trading tools built around pattern recognition and automation offer a useful parallel. The data-first discipline that wins a trading bot's monthly leaderboard is the same one that quietly wins an FPL mini-league: rigour, not impulse, dressed up as intuition.