Why Foster and Myhill Will Be 2015/16’s Most Important Goalkeepers

Whether you plan to field an elite goalkeeper next season or rotate two cheaper options, most teams are likely to include at least one cheap keeper. Hence, for most of us, identifying the cheap keepers is an important part of planning our goalkeeper strategy.

Looking at the keepers that ended last season priced under 5.0, two teams stand out above the rest: Stoke and West Brom. In the Season Ticker, these two teams are ranked substantially higher for clean sheets than the rest. Both are ranked above Everton and West Ham and just below Swansea and Liverpool, all of which had keepers priced above 5.0.

Of course, those are last season’s prices, not this season’s. And in fact, Stoke’s defensive performance last season is a strong reason to believe that Asimir Begovic will be priced similarly to the keepers of the teams just mentioned (say, around 5.0-5.5). However, West Brom is another story….

As you probably recall, part of the reason for Ben Foster’s low price at the end of last season (4.5) was his season-ending  injury in March, which brought his deputy Boaz Myhill (4.1) onto our radars.  News reports at the time ruled Foster out for six months, meaning he would return around Gameweek 9 of this season. (And that six-month estimate may well have been optimistic.)

With Foster out for at least a quarter of the season, if not more, is it reasonable to expect his price to be increased far above where it ended last season at 4.5? Likewise, with Myhill unlikely to play the whole season, is it likely that he will be priced above 4.5? I don’t know for sure, but it seems possible that both goalkeepers could start the season with prices well below what would be expected for a team of West Brom’s defensive quality.

If Foster/Myhill do end up priced in the sub-5.0 category, then there is a strong argument that Myhill should be in all of our teams. Of the 10 teams likely to have their keeper in this price range, West Brom have the best defence, so if you are fielding two cheap keepers, West Brom is the most reasonable place to start. And if you decide to field an elite keeper – no matter which one – the best second keeper arguably would be Myhill.

While another team may be a better rotation partner purely in terms of fixture difficulty we also have to consider the quality of that team’s defence to determine the expected points from the rotation pair. That is, even if another cheap keeper has slightly better fixtures than West Brom, the Baggies’ better defence means it may produce more clean sheets than a rotating pair.

To determine whether that is the case, I used the clean sheet and attacking rankings from the Fantasy Football Scout Members area version of the Season Ticker to estimate the expected goals and clean sheet probability for each match in the first 20 Gameweeks (at which point, we can use our January Wildcard). Then for each team, I considered every cheap keeper as a rotation partner and computed the expected goals allowed and expected clean sheets from that pairing. For every team, the optimal cheap rotation partner was West Brom.

Since most of us field either an elite keeper with a cheap one or two cheap keepers, we are using a rotation pair that includes at least one cheap keeper. And whichever your other keeper happens to be, this analysis suggests the best cheap keeper to pair them with is Myhill/Foster.

Of course, all of that depends on Myhill (and Foster, if he returns on schedule) being priced under 5.0. So their prices will be critical to examine when prices are released next month. If they are priced cheaply, I suggest you pencil in Myhill as one of your two keepers straight away.