Pick these 5 players and you’ll win FPL. Maybe.

In this post…

• Save yourself transfer anguish for the next 9 months by picking players who you never transfer out
• Why some of the most expensive players in each position are actually bargains
• Turn the lack of fixtures into an opportunity to spot value
• I attempt to establish ‘P-2’ in FPL terminology… what does it mean?
• Maths bits you can skip if you want
• How to win FPL (maybe)

Yes, that’s clickbait up there. But it’s not entirely unsubstantiated. We can do some maths to illustrate how certain players could really win you FPL if you pick them and keep them all season. Well, they might not win you FPL. But they’ll get you close. Maybe.

The maths bit you can skip

The basic calculation we’re using for this article is:

If all your players score an average of ‘price minus two‘ points per week over the entire season, you will get enough points to (maybe) win FPL.

So a player costing 4.5 needs to average 2.5 a week, a player costing 7.0 needs 5.0 a week, a players costing 11.5 needs 9.5 a week… you get the idea.

If you don’t want to do the maths, you can take this as a given and move on to the next section.

If you do, here’s how the calculation works:

• You have to spend all your 100 budget, or near enough.
• You also need to have a standard cheap bench (let’s say four players all costing 4.5).
• That means you have 82 of your 100 budget on the pitch and scoring you points. But that’s quite hard to do week-in-week-out, so let’s say you average slightly under that: 81 on the pitch per week.
• Every week you have 11 players on the pitch. (I’m ignoring the blanks and doubles!) If they all score two less than their price – however those prices are distributed – you’ll score (81 – 11*2) = 59 per week.
• That’s 59*38 = 2242 a season. But you get a captaincy bonus and chips on top of that. Let’s say a decent but not spectacular 7 points per week from captains (actual winners of FPL tend to average a lot more), and a cumulative 50 points from Free Hit, Bench Boost and Triple Captain bonuses.
• That means your final season total is 2242 + 7*38 + 50 = 2558. The 2019/20 winner, Joshua Bull, scored 2557!

I know this points total doesn’t actually guarantee anything – but in the last 10 seasons it would have won you FPL eight times, and got you very close the other two.

I also know there are far more sophisticated points-benchmarking systems out there… but this one’s good enough for my simple mind.

That’s the maths done. What do we do now?

So we’ve established our ‘price minus two’ metric – let’s call it P-2 for short. How do we actually use it to give ourselves a practical benefit in FPL? The way I see it is this:

We all spend a lot of time and energy (and -4 points hits) on transfers that don’t go to plan. It’s a familiar scenario: You keep a big-name player in your team for weeks, they keep on letting you down, then when you finally get rid of them, they immediately score two goals. Players like Aubameyang and Sterling fit this template last season: we pretty much knew they were going to hit 200 points overall, but they seemed inconsistent, so we tried to jump on and off, hitting their patches of good form. Unfortunately, half the time we hit the bad patches instead.

What if we could identify those players with the combination of fantasy pedigree, points potential and opportunity that meant we could leave them in our teams all season? The mythical ‘set and forgets’ (a phrase often used but virtually never followed). We’d get all their points hauls, reduce our reliance on transfers, and free our headspace to think about other players.

Sounds great, but we just have to be sure that those set-and-forgets are actually worth keeping. And the P-2 metric is a way of gauging that, using something a bit more concrete than guesswork.

The bigger the price, the bigger the challenge

If you go hunting for players that meet the hallowed P-2 benchmark, it won’t take long to realise that it’s far easier for cheap players to meet the standard. If there are any starting players costing 4.0, they don’t exactly have to be Lundstram to hit P-2 – they need to average 2.0 per game, which means they just need to collect appearance points and do nothing else all season, and apparently be good enough to (maybe) win you FPL. The more-common 4.5 defenders need barely more: 95 points. Last season, Egan started at 4.5 and scored 133 points – an entire point per gameweek more than his P-2 target!

The catch is that you need to spend all your budget, which you won’t do with 4.5 players (helpful though they undoubtedly are). But the higher you go up the price list, the harder you’re going to need to search for those FPL-winning gems.

As it happens, I did some searching already, and found five mid-to-high-price players who stand an excellent chance of exceeding that P-2 mark and winning you FPL (maybe).

Here they are, in ascending price order.

1. Matt Doherty, 6.0m

He’s already been an FPL gem for two seasons straight and is still somehow being overlooked in favour of cheaper defensive options. In 2019/20, Doherty was the fourth-highest scoring defender, and the highest-scoring non-Liverpool defender, in the entire game – and he didn’t even get a price rise this season!

Costing 6.0, Doherty needs to score 4.0*38 = 152 points to hit P-2 value. Last season he scored 167. So he could actually get a bit worse than he was last year, and still be a (potentially) FPL-winning pick. This is, in a word, mad.

2. Chris Wood, 6.5m

Last season was a golden one for the mid-priced striker, and the likes of Ings and Jimenez were duly given hefty price rises for 2020/21. Burnley’s Chris Wood, however, seems to have been overlooked, and starts at the same 6.5 cost as he did last year. OK, he didn’t get as many goals as Ings or Jimenez – but that headline stat is misleading. Wood played significantly fewer minutes than either of them, and still got a higher xG – 7th highest in the entire league, in fact, higher than Aubameyang!

We are looking for 4.5*38 = 171 points from Wood. He was 35 short of that in 2019/20, but he missed around 30% of all minutes owing to injury. If he scores points at the same rate, he needs to play 3062 minutes – or 358 minutes (four matches) short of the entire season. For a clear first-choice striker, that is easily achievable if he stays fit.

3. Phil Foden, 6.5m

Picking Man City players has elicited the same dialogue in FPL managers for years: “His points potential is so high… but he could be rotated… but his points potential is so high… but he could be rotated…” When they cost 6.5, however, and appear set to be part of Pep’s plans just as much as any other member of the squad, the rotation just doesn’t matter so much.

Like Wood, Foden needs to score 171 points to be an FPL-winner for you (maybe). Last season he was a long way off, with 69 – but that was from just 888 minutes.

How many will he get this season? No one knows. Let’s estimate that he gets similar gametime to Mahrez or Bernardo Silva in 2019/20 (~2000 minutes). If he scores at the same rate as last season, he’ll finish the season on 155, slightly short of the P-2 goal.

But Foden is a player on the up. Of his seven fantasy returns in 2019/20, six came after lockdown. Given that even a slight improvement is enough for us, he seems a solid bet, and his ceiling is much higher than that.

4. Trent Alexander-Arnold, 7.5m

Not exactly a maverick pick, TAA is already 56% owned at the time of writing. But it bears repeating just how good value he – along with his fellow Liverpool defenders – really is.

TAA’s 2019/20 total of 33 fantasy returns is the sort of season that would have an attacker priced easily over 10 million the following year – but he has been priced at a modest 7.5. He might be the most expensive defender but he looks like phenomenal value nonetheless.

The P-2 formula bears this out. He needs to score 5.5*38 = 209 points this year. Last season he scored… 210. So if TAA keeps up his current performance level, he’ll return (perhaps) FPL-winning value even if you don’t captain him once.

In fact, the argument could be made to get in Robertson and VVD on the same basis. Liverpool ‘only’ got 15 clean sheets last season – a good result, but surely repeatable, especially if they don’t lose Alisson to injury again. If they end up doing similarly, Robertson is forecast to be somewhere around his P-2 target of 190 points, while VVD will exceed his target of 171. Anyone fancy the triple?

5. Kevin de Bruyne, 11.5m

This is the big one. KDB is, again, not much of a maverick pick, but it’s still a surprise that he can return value, as well as total points, at a cost of 11.5.

Wait, you’re already doing the maths… Kevin needs to score 9.5*38 = 361 points over the season, which is clearly impossible – 303 is the all-time record, and Kev got ‘just’ 251 while being last season’s top scorer.

But if we include captaincy bonus…

OK, it’s sort of cheating, but we can keep it reasonable. Someone captaining KDB every week last season would have accrued 502 points from him – goal achieved easily! But no active manager really does that.

Thankfully, all we have to do is captain KDB half the time to meet P-2. It doesn’t even need to be for his best 19 weeks – just 19 completely average weeks will bring his contribution to 376 points for our teams. Bingo!

So who do we captain for the other weeks? Here are a few suggestions…

Honourable mentions

These players didn’t quite make the cut but are still excellent value picks with good chances of hitting P-2. Again, in ascending order of value:

Mitrovic: At a priced-to-sell 6.0, Fulham’s probable talisman needs just 152 points to hit P-2. When he was last in the Premier League, he got 134. Will he improve, or will VAR-induced red cards lessen his total instead?

Mahrez: Good value at 8.5 last season, Mahrez has somehow been given the same price again. He’s excellent in so many respects, but his required P-2 total of 247 is just a little high unless you captain him a few times (which FPL players will be reluctant to do given his risk of the dreaded 1-point cameo).

Werner: I could have picked any major Chelsea asset really… Ziyech at 8.0 or Pulisic at 8.5 could prove to be excellent value. But I’ve gone for the most expensive of all – Werner at 9.5 – as a points and value pick. You’ll need to captain him a fair chunk to reach his 285-point P-2 target, but he could well prove worthy of the captain’s armband. With FPL moving players into midfield wholesale, Werner has a very good chance of being this season’s highest-scoring FPL striker.

Fernandes: Scored 117 points since his arrival in the latter half of 2019/20, which is as incredible as it is wholly unsustainable. But if he were somehow to keep that rate up for every minute of a season, he’d score a record-smashing 337 – enough to return P-2 value for a price all the way up to 10.5. His price this season? 10.5!

Aguero: The most consistent elite performer in the last decade of FPL, Aguero has inexplicably fallen out of favour, with questions over whether Jesus will get his spot. But we had those questions last season, and the season before… and it never happened. At 10.5 and *always* a captaincy option, if he’s fit and ready to play, can you really say no?

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Thanks for reading. Here’s the small print:

• This is all very unscientific! Despite how I might have made it appear, you can’t use the P-2 model to get yourself an exact number of points. But you can use it to give yourself something to aim for, and use it an an objective metric to judge your players against.
• That said, I really think that sticking some players in permanently (fitness permitting) and saving your transfers for other positions could be a good thing.
• Just because a player isn’t on my list (Auba, Salah, Mané or whoever your favourite is) doesn’t mean they aren’t good. Of course they are – those players are all odds-on to get big scores again. They just aren’t of ‘game-breaking’ value, in my view. But it’s still fine to pick ‘poor value’ players – in the end, you’re aiming for points, not value.
• If you disagree or think I’ve missed someone, send FPL Panic a message on Twitter or Insta.
• Only one person can win FPL. But it could be you. Maybe.