FPL injury news, availability flags and what they do to a projection

Flags are a scalar, not a warning

The official game gives you a status letter and a chance-of-playing percentage. Most tools render that as an icon and leave the projection untouched. The correct treatment is to multiply the entire minutes distribution by the availability figure: a 75 per cent player has his expected minutes and therefore his expected points reduced by a quarter, before any other adjustment.

Doing it this way means a flagged premium can still out-project a fit mid-price player, which is often the right answer and is invisible in a warning-icon system.

The between-gameweek data trap

Fantasy Premier League blanks the chance-of-playing-this-round field once a gameweek closes, while keeping the player flagged and keeping the next-round figure populated. A model reading only the this-round field will see null, treat it as no doubt, and assign full availability to a player the game is explicitly warning about.

The fix is a fallback chain: this-round chance, then next-round chance, then a conservative default for any player still flagged as doubtful without a number. This single bug is responsible for a lot of confidently wrong projections across the FPL tool ecosystem.

Second-source injury reporting

Official flags lag press conferences and sometimes never appear for minor knocks. Independent injury reporting adds reason, body part, detail and expected return date, which lets the model distinguish a one-week hamstring precaution from a six-week absence.

Matching those reports to the right player is harder than it sounds. Squads contain multiple players sharing a surname, and the same surname appears at different clubs. Matching must be club-verified — name plus club plus position — or you will import a Gabriel injury onto the wrong Gabriel.

Rotation is not injury

A fully fit player can still be a minutes risk. Congested fixture blocks, European commitments and managers with established rotation patterns all reduce expected starts without any flag at all.

This is where a verified depth chart matters: an explicit ranking of who starts in each position for each club, maintained against actual team sheets, overriding the statistical estimate where the pattern is clear.

How to read the numbers before a deadline

• —Probability of appearing — is he in the squad at all
• —Probability of 60+ minutes — the only threshold that matters for defensive points and appearance points
• —Expected minutes — the number that scales every attacking rate
• —Availability multiplier — the flag's actual cost, shown as a number rather than a colour
• —Last data refresh — a projection built on Thursday's news is not a Saturday projection

Refresh cadence

Availability data is worthless if it is stale. FPLHERMES re-syncs official flags and injury reporting on a schedule through the week and again close to the deadline, and every page shows when the underlying run was produced so you can tell whether you are looking at current information.