3 Best Captain Picks for FPL GW17 [Captaincy Index]

In this article, we will look at the best captain picks for Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 17 of the 2024/25 season.

If you are familiar with our captaincy decision-making process, we always pick a reliable player as our captain that has an easy fixture. We developed our captaincy index – a score that helps us to find the best captain picks for any gameweek.

So, if you are not sure who to captain in Gameweek 17, check our calculations for inspiration.

FPL Captain picks for Gameweek 17

We picked a range of players and calculated the captaincy index for them. You can check it in the table below. Players are sorted by the highest score in the captaincy index. The best captaincy picks in GW17 are at the top.

*GW16 data added

If you are more into the manual process of picking the best captain in FPL, check our article: How to pick a captain in FPL?

Best Gameweek 17 Captain

According to our captaincy index, Salah is the best captain in FPL Gameweek 17 with a captaincy index score of 1.95

Saka (captaincy index score 1.68) is the number 2 captaincy pick and Palmer (1.57) is number 3.

History of our captaincy picks

History of our captaincy picks from the 2023/24 season

Captaincy index explained

Fantasy Football Report’s Captaincy Index is a sum of six numbers. When looking at each individually, they cannot give us the full picture of whether a player is a good captaincy option or not. But when we combine them, we will get a better picture of the player’s captaincy potential.

Variables in Captaincy Index

• xGI per 90 – Expected Goals per 90 + Expected Assists per 90 so far in the season according to Official FPL website
• Reliability Index – this is a number that measures how reliable a player was in delivering stable output in his 3 previous Premier League seasons. It is calculated as (Average Amount of Total Points over the last three seasons – 76)/350
• Form – this is the form number from Official FPL stats
• Opposition FDR – Defensive Fixture Difficulty Ranking of opposition in current gameweek (*if double gameweek, the average FDR for both matches) from Vaastav’s GitHub data
• Positional advantage – Boolean variable. If a player is midfielder, the number is 1. If forward, it is 0. If defender, it is  2. The idea behind this variable is that mids are usually scoring bigger hauls than forwards, as they earn more points for goals and clean sheets. We want our system to get a slight advantage to midfielders over forwards.
• Is Home – Boolean variable. If a player plays at home in the current gameweek, the number is 1. If not, it is 0. We want to our system to get slight advatage to players playing at home. (*if double gameweek, the sum for both matches)

Weights of variables

Each variable has its own weight according to its importance in our overall metric. Those weights are:

• Weight of Expected Involvements = 3/4
• Weight of Reliability = 1
• Weight of Form = 1/25
• Weight of opposition FDR = 1/(FDR*FDR) (*if double gameweek FDR = 2/(FDR*FDR))
• Weight of Is Midfielder = 1/10
• Weight of Is Home = 1/10  (*if double gameweek = IsHome1/10 + IsHome2/10))

The formula for captaincy index calculation

Then, the captaincy index is calculated as sum of variables multiplied by their weights:

Captaincy Index = (0.75*Expected Involvements + Reliability Index + 1/25 * Form + 1/FDR + 1/10 * Positional  Advantage + 1/10 * Is Home)

Matej Šuľan

Fantasy Football enthusiast with two top 1k finishes in FPL. Best FPL overall rank: 119th in 2019/20 season. Five top 500 finishes in UCL Fantasy, best overall rank: 23rd in 2018/19 season. Founder of Fantasy Football Reports.