What is 'free hit' in Fantasy Football and when should you use it?

Fantasy football is back and here to take over your life again this season, with the return of Premier League football.

Fantasy Premier League is an online game where players collect points based on how the real-life footballers they’ve selected for their team perform each week.

Each week, you are allowed to make a transfer by selling a member of your squad and buying a new one. Each player has a value, based on how many points they tend to score, but you will need to replace a striker with another striker, or a defender with another defender, and so on. This is where options such as the Free Hit chip can come in handy, as they allow you to make transfers without the usual restrictions.

You have to pick your players based on a limited budget, but the game does come with four bonus chips, which you can use once throughout each season, which can help give your team a boost.

In FPL you are given one free transfer per week, and any additional transfer will incur a penalty of –4 points, but this can be avoided by strategically using one of your bonus chips.

FPL is back and has over 8 million active players

What is a Free Hit in FPL?

FPL comes with four bonus chips: Wildcard, Free Hit, Triple Captain and Bench Boost.

Playing the Free Hit chip allows managers to make an unlimited amount of transfers in a selected gameweek.

A Free Hit is similar to a Wildcard, except the changes you make to your team will only last one game week. After that week ends, your team will go back to how it was before you used the Free Hit.

The Free Hit was originally introduced for the 17/18 season and was brought in to replace the All Out Attack chip, which allowed a manager to play an extra attacker in place of a defender. However, the Free Hit option is arguably much more useful and versatile that its predecessor. 

It’s worth noting that, even if you have free transfers going into the activation of the free hit, you’ll be set back for the following gameweek. Any transfers you’ve saved will be lost, so you should take this into account when you decide to activate the chip.

How can I play the Free Hit chip?

To activate the free hit, you can do this in the My Team page, where it’s presented as an option along with the other chips.

When you go to confirm a transfer, you’ll also be presented with the option to play the free hit chip.

This will pop up even if you’re just playing a free transfer, not just when you’re trying to use a number of transfers which will result in a hit.