FPL is just one week away, and the decision-making processes are starting to take shape. You hopefully have a good idea of who the core of your team is going to be.
This edition will be focusing on looking at value and the maths behind the Moneyball approach that I am going to be carrying out this season.
Gameweek 1 fixtures
Friday 21st August
8 pm- Arsenal vs Coventry
Saturday 22nd August
12:30 pm- Hull vs Manchester United
3 pm- Ipswich vs Sunderland
3 pm- Everton vs Crystal Palace
3 pm- Nottingham Forest vs Leeds
5:30 pm- Brentford vs Spurs
Sunday 23rd August
2 pm- Manchester City vs Bournemouth
2 pm- Brighton vs Aston Villa
4:30 pm- Newcastle vs Liverpool
Monday 24th August
8 pm- Fulham vs Chelsea
The maths behind the MoneyBall approach: No to Haaland
Last season the winner of FPL got 2582 points, the first season in a long time where Mo Salah didn’t break the game with his unsustainable level of FPL scoring. In my mathematical approach this season, I have set out the aim for 2500 points, a score which would have seen a top 1k finish last season.
A score of 2500 would have seen you win FPL in 2015/16, 2014/15 and 2012/13, within the last 14 years.
Across 38 gameweeks, that means a score of 65.7 points.
When you first hear that number, it sounds rather achievable. Especially when you break it down, it requires 5.48 points per player per gameweek (65.7 divided by 12 to take into account the captain getting a double points score every week)
To try and consider every player's scoring potential in FPL as equal would also be mathematically foolish. 5 points would be an excellent score for a goalkeeper on any given week, but to get an average of that score would be nearly impossible. Therefore, we need to consider the value of players to earn their points.
With a budget of £100 million for 15 players, this gets a little bit complicated due to the benching of four players each week.
However, when trying to think about this logically, I came to a different conclusion about the cost of an FPL squad. Each player has a minimum cost.
For two goalkeepers, you need to spend at least £8m (£4m each). For five defenders, there is a minimum cost of £20m (£4m each). For five midfielders, there is a minimum cost of £22.5m (£4.5m each), and for three forwards, the minimum cost is £13.5m (£4.5m each).
That is a total minimum cost of £64m. This means in our FPL budget we actually only have £36m to make choices.
Many will look at Erling Haaland as 15.5% of their budget with his £15.5m price tag, but realistically, at £11m over his minimum price as a forward, he really takes up 30.6% of the budget that you actually have to spend.
This is one of the reasons that I will not be owning Erling Haaland to start this season. I may get him in at certain periods during the year when chip strategy or fixture run dictates, but that may not happen at all.
Factoring in chips
As previously stated, we pick up 12 scores per gameweek, but there are also chips to factor into the maths.
12 scores per gw x 38 gameweeks= 456 scores
2 Triple captain chips= 458 total
2 Bench boost chips is 8 more= 466 scores
With double gameweeks throughout the year, I would aim to get at least 12 extra scored throughout the season.
Total of 478 scores
We still have free-hits to consider, but they don’t offer any extra games necessarily; obviously, in these weeks we will look to score above our average.
This brings our average points per score down to 5.23.
To factor in for those weeks with extra games, we are going to look for a score of 63 points on a standard week, where we have 11 games.
How to figure out the value from this number
Looking at that 63 points on a standard gameweek, we also have to remember that some things are ultimately true. If we choose players who are going to start in our teams, they get 2 points. Obviously, there will be some players in each week who are surprisingly benched and will come off the bench for one point as a base. Some will get yellow cards and occasionally our goalkeepers and defenders will concede more than two goals.
With this in mind, we can consider the average points for appearances at 1.5 per player.
1.5 x11= 16.5
I’m going to be quite conservative and say that I want 6 points from my captain. This seems quite low but will cover the weeks we have a captaincy blank.
So that is 22.5 points each week that I am hoping to bank each week, to reach our 63 point targets. From our 11 players just outside of just playing we want to pick up 40.5 points.
Now we need to try and make the most out of our £36 million of leftover budget. Obviously we aren’t going to have the bench as the cheapest players each week. If we allow £4m of our additional budget
So that leaves us £32m on top of our base amount per player to get 41 points per gameweek.
So for every million games of budget we used, we want to be earning 1.28 points.
So what does that look for each price point per week, across the next 5 gameweeks and across 10 gameweeks.
Here is the expected points table based on your baseline formula (£4.0m = 1.5 Pts/GW, with +0.64 Pts/GW for every additional £0.5m):
FPL Expected Points Breakdownok
Price (£m) Avg Pts / GW Avg Pts / 5 GWs Avg Pts / 10 GWs
£4.0m 1.50 7.50 15.00
£4.5m 2.14 10.70 21.40
£5.0m 2.78 13.90 27.80
£5.5m 3.42 17.10 34.20
£6.0m 4.06 20.30 40.60
£6.5m 4.70 23.50 47.00
£7.0m 5.34 26.70 53.40
£7.5m 5.98 29.90 59.80
£8.0m 6.62 33.10 66.20
£8.5m 7.26 36.30 72.60
£9.0m 7.90 39.50 79.00
£9.5m 8.54 42.70 85.40
£12.0m 11.74 58.70 117.40
£15.5m 16.22 81.10 162.20
Key Takeaways from Your Model
Every £1.0m invested adds 1.28 points per Gameweek (6.4 points over 5 GWs, 12.8 points over 10 GWs).
Premium Assets: At £15.5m (e.g., Erling Haaland), the baseline expectation reaches 16.22 points per Gameweek—meaning to justify that price tag under this linear model without captaincy, the player needs to average roughly two goals/assists plus maximum bonus points every single week.
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