FPL 26/27 has launched: My first impressions on pricing and value

From defenders to forwards, what is the landscape?

Alright, reader.

FPL is fully back, so we can finally compare players’ values, make our drafts, and do all the fun stuff that comes with it.

The theme of the upcoming season’s pricing is pretty clear and can be summed up in three points:

1️⃣ Bump up the prices of the previous campaign’s top performers: Erling Haaland (£15.5m), Bruno Fernandes (£12.0m), and Gabriel (£8.0m)

2️⃣ Increase the prices of all the best DEFCON defenders

3️⃣ Make the rest of the players relatively affordable

💡 It wasn’t a very elaborate process, and it’s difficult to say whether this was deliberate to make the game accessible to the broadest possible audience, or to make it more fun by being exploitable.

At the same time, it’s not a wrong strategy.

There were several ways to approach pricing this season, and this is simply one of them. It doesn’t make much sense to speculate on whether it’s good or bad.

Anyway, this subsequently creates a certain dynamic:

→ You can exploit DEFs by evaluating discrepancies in the number of defensive contributions they will earn compared with last season, or in how players new to the Premier League will perform

→ Pricing makes it very difficult to own all three players mentioned above without compromising your structure and flexibility too much. To get a better feel for it, I tried to create a random Haaland+Bruno+Gabriel draft:

It’s not that bad, but it certainly lacks balance and firepower.

You’d need to nail pretty much all your picks to have a chance of it performing well.

→ There’s plenty of wiggle room to find underpriced “value picks”, which is always nice and is an essence of FPL, at least for me. It’s also extremely important to be early on those players before they become bandwagons – the template, especially in defence, might emerge rather quickly.

As always, the midfield is a good place to look for them during the season, as dynamics can shift quickly (role changes, injuries, etc.).

I didn’t notice any controversial positional decision, like last year’s Jarrod Bowen being added to the game as FWD.

Anyway, today I plan to review all positions and highlight prices that have caught my interest for various reasons. As we gather more information on transfers and pre-season minutes, we will refine our GW1 pool of viable picks.

What looks good now might not be viable in Gameweek 1.

Note: Let’s not overemphasise fixtures at this stage. It doesn’t make much sense to evaluate them with so many transfers still to be announced across the Premier League. I will instead focus on each player’s value relative to others.

Note 2: Many players featured in the late stages of the World Cup, and their involvement in Gameweek 1 is questionable. It could even be 20 or so players.

We don’t know yet.

Defenders: Did they strike a balance?

Apart from Gabriel, who averaged 6.9 points per start last season, defenders are capped at £6.5 million, compared with £6 million last season.

• There are three of them: Jurriën Timber, Virgil van Dijk, and Nico O’Reilly.

I don’t have a problem with that, because each of them can realistically become the highest-scoring defender if the stars align.

At the same time, you need strong conviction that it will happen, and because there’s a fair share of uncertainty about Arsenal (Saliba out, players late from the WC), Liverpool (new manager, likely new starting CB), and Manchester City (new manager, new dynamics players-wise), I don’t see many managers starting the season with them.

• The £6 million category includes: William Saliba, Maxence Lacroix, James Tarkowski, Marc Guéhi, Matheus Nunes, Marcos Senesi.

This one is a mixed bag.

William Saliba is injured and doesn’t provide much attacking threat. Maxence Lacroix will play in Xabi Alonso’s system, which is focused on control in all phases of the play*. And Senesi might not even start regularly and is one of those who spent ages in the World Cup.

Manchester City duo make sense.

James Tarkowski too, given his typology and how overpowered DEFCONs are.

*However, if it’s really a back 3, Lacroix will be CCB. That means he’ll do a fair share of active defending and is amazing in the air, so I wouldn’t rule him out just yet. But yeah, his defcons will more likely go down.

Is Xabi Alonso a perfect match for Chelsea in FPL?

The £5.5m bracket is much more bloated: