Which FPL players are the best bets for hitting form at the start of the season?

In our latest Premium Members article, regular Scout contributor Statto99 examines which Fantasy Premier League (FPL) assets could be quick out of the blocks in 2021/22.

ATTACKERS

The criteria for making our list of attacking ‘early risers’ is this:

• Only the first four Gameweeks considered regardless of circumstances
• Scored two or more goals
• Made three or more goal contributions (including ‘Fantasy’ assists)

For the opening Gameweeks of 2020/21 those criteria produced a list of 31 attacking players, the top of which looks like this:

The jet-propelled start made by Son Heung-min (£10.0m) and Harry Kane (£12.5m) is now etched into FPL folklore, but not so many remember Dominic Calvert-Lewin (£8.0m) outpacing Mohamed Salah (£12.5m) or Neil Maupay‘s (£6.5m) goal-a-game start for a Brighton and Hove Albion side that would soon find it desperately hard to hit the back of the net.

Jorginho (£6.0m) benefitted from the early flurry of penalties being awarded in a hyper-sensitive refereeing environment while the jury was still out on whether Patrick Bamford (£8.0m) and Ollie Watkins (£7.5m) could sustain this kind of form so soon after stepping up from the Championship.

If you’d managed to select a few of these in your starting squad, or taken a judicious hit here and there to grab them early, you were probably setting the pace in your mini-leagues, but there was a steady cast of performers just below this top group who were also putting significant points on the board:

Aston Villa and Manchester United were among the teams to miss Gameweek 1 because of commitments late into the previous, over-running season, but Bruno Fernandes (£12.0m) still managed to get a couple of goals and an assist in his opening three fixtures while no fewer than three Villa players joined him in the early riser ranks as the exhilarating 7-2 home demolition of Liverpool and a pair of victories over promoted Fulham and Sheffield United generated plenty of attacking spoils to share around.

A couple of defenders also qualified under the attacking criteria with a pair of set-piece goals for Chelsea’s Kurt Zouma (£5.5m) and some rampaging forward runs by Timothy Castagne (£5.5m) bringing Leicester City early returns.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

What you can’t fail to notice is the eclectic mix of attacking early risers in 2020/21 ranging from celebrated FPL names like Sadio Mané (£12.0m) and Raúl Jiménez (£7.5m) to promoted talent and unsung heroes in Callum Robinson and Pablo Fornals (£6.0m).

Overall, 31 midfielders and forwards qualified for the early riser list for last season, but what could be useful to this year’s FPL managers is knowing whether there are any patterns that emerge when you extend the scope back to earlier campaigns. If you take the most recent three seasons there are never fewer than 25 attacking early risers:

This is good news for FPL managers as it demonstrates that every season there are about four times more attacking options than are needed for an FPL squad that return significantly in the opening Gameweeks and, as we have seen, they come at a range of price points.

Even more helpfully, five ‘banker’ attackers have achieved the required standard in each of the last three seasons. The £12.0+m trio of Salah, Kane and Mané will surprise nobody by their inclusion, but few would easily guess the identity of the other two.

UNEXPECTED PARTIES