The key to success in FPL is to pick players that outperform their pricing in the game. A player who outperforms his pricing would then be considered good value. One way to look at player value is to calculate points per million (pts/m). If a player scores 200 points a season and costs on average 8m he is providing you with 25 pts/m. The starting budget is 100m so if you would average a 25 pts/m over the season with a budget fixed at 100m that would result in a 2500 points season.
But that’s not true, is it?
This calculation is ignoring the most important factor in FPL and that’s captaincy.
Each week FPL managers pick a captain who gets his points doubled for that particular gameweek (GW). Now let’s set up a typical scenario for a FPL manager who is picking his team for the 21/22 season. Let’s assume he plans to wildcard after the second international break. This means we are setting up a team for the first 7 GWs. Let’s agree on the consensus that Mohamed Salah will outscore all other players during that period so he picks Salah into his team. Bruno Fernandes is also tipped to do well so he puts him in the team as well. Salah and Bruno are both premium players priced at 12.5m and 12m respectively. On paper, Salah is more expensive but one could argue that Bruno has a higher Effective Player Price (EPP). Let’s explore how one could reach that conclusion.
The first 7 fixtures for Salah and Bruno are (captaincy in bold):
Salah: nor – BUR – CHE – lee – CRY – bre – MCI
Bruno: LEE – sou – wol – NEW – whu – AV – EVE
For simplicity let’s assume these two are the only two captaincy candidates in the team (although one could probably find a better pick in GW3 and even GW7). I think it’s fair to say that of those two Salah would be captained in at least 4 out of those 7 fixtures (GW1, GW2, GW5 and GW6), so let’s go with that scenario.
Now let’s define the term EPP as the player price multiplied with the Effective Points Multiplier (EPM).
The EPM is defined as
– 1 for players who you own (bench included)
– 2 for your captain (3 if triple captain)
Advancing with our scenario we can calculate the EPP for the two players over the 7 games period in the following way:
Salah: ((12.5/2 x 4) + (12.5 x 3)) / 7 = 8.9m
Bruno: ((12/2 x 3) + (12 x 4)) / 7 = 9.4m
These results show that although Salah is priced higher than Bruno he has a lower EPP than Bruno. This is because Salah is getting double the points for the price of one more often. This also illustrates that both players have a lower EPP than lower-priced players such as Heung-Min Son (10.0m) or Jadon Sancho (9.5m) if we would add them to the team but never captain them. Even if we would captain Son in GW3 vs WAT his EPP would only drop to 9.2m which is still higher than Salah’s 8.9m.
Back to the question in the headline. Is Salah the most expensive player in FPL? The answer is no if you like most others would captain him often enough that his EPP would drop lower than EPP of other players. In all likelihood the most expensive player is the highest-priced player that you would never captain.
Thank you for reading, if you have any questions or comments you can find me on Twitter @FPL_Disorder
2 years, 9 months agoThanks for writing Disorder!