Following Friday’s round of player price reveals for the new Fantasy Premier League (FPL) season, there was more activity on Saturday.
READ MORE: Every Fantasy Premier League player price revealed so far
Liverpool were first up this morning, with Mohamed Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andrew Robertson among the Reds priced up.
Manchester United, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Aston Villa and Fulham then followed in the afternoon.
KEY TALKING POINTS
- LIVERPOOL: Salah climbs to £13.0m; Jota now a forward; no rise for Alexander-Arnold
- MAN UTD: Ronaldo, Fernandes and Sancho drop £2.0m each; Rashford now £6.5m
- WOLVES: Jonny and Neto cheap at £4.5m and £5.5m
- ASTON VILLA: Cash and Digne still at £5.0m; Coutinho is £7.0m
- FULHAM: Mitrovic enters at £6.5m
LIVERPOOL
Mohamed Salah will set FPL managers back £13.0m for 2022/23. That is the Egyptian’s highest starting price since 2018/19, the season that followed his record-breaking, 303-point debut campaign at Anfield. He did reach the heights of £13.3m in the spring of this year, however.
Salah is also still a midfielder, the most emphatic confirmation yet that we’re not about to see FPL Towers radically rejig the positional classifications for the new season.
Luis Diaz (£8.0m) is £5.0m cheaper than his teammate, while Diogo Jota and new signing Darwin Nunez both come in at £9.0m. Jota is now a forward after spending much of last season playing through the middle of Jurgen Klopp’s 4-3-3 system. By our calculations, Jota would have ended up on 159 points had he been reclassified last season – enough to finish as the joint-second highest-scoring forward alongside Cristiano Ronaldo. The arrival of Nunez gives him even more competition up top, of course.
There is no price rise for Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.5m) despite his 208-point campaign, with that total falling just short of the all-time Fantasy Premier League record for a defender.
Andrew Robertson (£7.0m) and Virgil van Dijk (£6.5m) remain steady at their 2021/22 starting prices, too, while Alisson surprisingly drops to £5.5m despite finishing as FPL’s highest-scoring goalkeeper – a move that may well challenge many of our preconceived ideas about opting for a £4.5m budget shot-stopper. Indeed, the best-performing possible ‘ghost squad’ of 2021/22 (that we’ve seen, anyway) had a £5.5m-rated goalkeeper, Hugo Lloris, between the posts.
There’ll be much less interest in the other three Liverpool players priced up today, with Harvey Elliott (£5.0m) and Thiago Alcantara (£5.5m) Fantasy footnotes. New signing Calvin Ramsay is the first £4.0m-rated defender we’ve seen so far, matching what Kostas Tsimikas was a year ago. Ramsay is a back-up at right-back and was a prolific chance creator in his breakthrough year at Aberdeen but it’ll take a serious Alexander-Arnold injury for him to enter our thoughts and even then, Klopp might still opt for Joe Gomez or James Milner initially given that Ramsay is still only 18 years old.
READ MORE: Liverpool player and team stats
MANCHESTER UNITED
Manchester United’s miserable 2021/22 has seen many of their players subsequently tumble in price.
Cristiano Ronaldo (£10.5m) and Bruno Fernandes (£10.0m) have both dropped £2.0m from where they entered the game last season, potentially making them affordable third premium options for the upcoming campaign if Erik ten Hag can perform miracles and rejuvenate an ageing, stale squad – and that’s a big ‘if’.
Ronaldo was, it should be stressed, the second-highest-scoring FPL forward of 2021/22, finding the back of the net on 18 occasions as United slumped to a sixth-place finish.
Fernandes was a huge disappointment last season but racked up more points than even Salah in 2020/21, so any signs of recovery under ten Hag could present us with a few bargains in FPL.
Jadon Sancho (£7.5m) has also dropped by the same margin as his two aforementioned teammates and experiencing an even bigger price plunge is Marcus Rashford (£6.5m), who was £9.5m before last season got underway. Rashford flopped in the last 12 months but he registered a combined 47 attacking returns over his previous two campaigns, so there is some now-dormant Fantasy pedigree there.
Anthony Elanga (£5.0m) hasn’t changed in price, meanwhile, despite 2021/22 being his breakthrough year at United. Of the Red Devils’ squad, only Fernandes, David de Gea and Diogo Dalot started more league matches than the young Swede from Gameweek 22 onwards.
In defence, Luke Shaw (£5.0m), Raphael Varane (£5.0m) and David de Gea (£5.0m) drop half a million after a dismal campaign for United’s backline in which they kept more clean sheets (eight) than just four other teams.
Alex Telles (£5.0m), Fred (£5.5m) and Donny van de Beek (£5.5m) round off the United price reveals.
READ MORE: Manchester United player team and stats
WOLVERHAMPTON WANDERERS
There aren’t too many eyebrow-raisers with the Wolverhampton Wanderers price reveals.
Raul Jimenez (£7.0m) drops half a million after an underwhelming season in which he scored on just six occasions, while Jose Sa holds steady at £5.0m after an impressive debut Premier League campaign in which his heroics helped Wolves to 11 clean sheets.
Bruno Lage’s side sit top of our Season Ticker for fixture difficulty in the opening six Gameweeks, although they finished 2021/22 in dismal form.
There are a couple of potential bargains for that early-season run: Jonny comes in at £4.5m, while Pedro Neto is down to a cut-price £5.5m after an injury-affected campaign.
Neto was sidelined for the first six months of 2021/22, being gradually reintegrated into Lage’s first-team squad and making five starts before the season’s close. He was also effectively playing up front in a strike partnership towards the tail-end of the season, so he is very much one for the watchlist after delivering 13 attacking returns in 2020/21.
The versatile Jonny meanwhile scored twice after his own long lay-off and would appear set to start 2022/23 at right wing-back with Nelson Semedo (£5.0m) looking unlikely to be fit for the beginning of August.
Elsewhere, Rayan Ait-Nouri and Max Kilman also stay at £4.5m but Conor Coady joins Semedo at £5.0m after an impressive 2021/22 in which he finished as the 12th-highest-scoring defender in FPL.
Hwang Hee-chan has been reclassified as a midfielder and is listed at £6.0m, with Daniel Podence (£5.5m) and Ruben Neves (£5.5m) unchanged from where they were a year ago.
READ MORE: Wolves player and team stats
ASTON VILLA
The pricing is probably just about on the generous side of ‘expected’ at Villa, too.
Matty Cash, the top-scoring FPL defender outside of the big-six clubs last season, certainly stands out at £5.0m.
Cash delivered seven attacking returns and 13 clean sheets from the same starting price in 2021/22, starting every single Premier League game for the Villans. The hope will be that, with centre-half Diego Carlos (£5.0m) and defensive midfielder Boubacar Kamara (£5.0m) added to the squad, Villa can improve further when it comes shut-outs in 2021/22.
Lucas Digne (£5.0m), that most tempting but frequently underwhelming of FPL assets, and Emi Martinez (£5.0m) are the same price as Cash.
Ollie Watkins, the club’s top goalscorer in the last two seasons, is Villa’s highest priced asset at £7.5m, exactly what he was 12 months ago. Danny Ings (£7.0m) and Philippe Coutinho (£7.0m) come in half a million cheaper, with the Brazilian’s run of 10 successive blanks between Gameweeks 29 and 37 no doubt helping keep his price down.
Jacob Ramsey is no longer the bargain-bin option he was last season, meanwhile, with his breakthrough campaign resulting in a rise to £5.5m.
Midfielders John McGinn (£5.5m) and Emi Buendía (£6.0m) were the other two Villa players priced up today.
READ MORE: Aston Villa player and team stats
FULHAM
Aleksandar Mitrovic was the headline-grabber from Fulham’s crop of price reveals, with a £6.5m tag about what was expected.
The Serb hasn’t yet fully convinced at Premier League level but he plundered a record-breaking 43 goals in the Championship last season and this Marco Silva incarnation of the Cottagers is considerably more attacking than the side managed by Scott Parker in 2020/21.
Harry Wilson was another who shone in the English second tier in 2020/21, delivering 29 attacking returns in 41 league appearances. The set-piece specialist, who last popped up in FPL while at Bournemouth in 2019/20, assisted more goals than any other player in the Championship last season and re-enters the game at £6.0m.
The winger who mostly operated on the opposite flank to Wilson, Neeskens Kebano, gets a £5.5m listing. He wasn’t quite as secure a starter as his fellow wide-man, with nine of his 40 run-outs coming as a substitute. He also delivered only half of what Wilson did in terms of attacking returns, registering nine goals and six assists.
There’s probably not too much Fantasy interest elsewhere, with a quartet of defensive assets – Tim Ream, Tosin Adarabioyo, Kenny Tete and goalkeeper Marek Rodak – all priced up at £4.5m. The west London side were only joint-sixth for clean sheets in the Championship last season although did lead the way for fewest expected goals conceded (xGC). Still, they’re seen as a more front-foot team and there aren’t high hopes for their defensive options in FPL this season.
Rodrigo Muniz (£5.5m), Tom Cairney (£5.0m), Bobby Decordova-Reid (£5.5m) and Ivan Cavaleiro (£5.0m) weren’t even nailed starters at Championship level, meanwhile, so will be irrelevant unless they have an unexpectedly barnstorming pre-season.
1 year, 9 months agoA Sancho injury and we'll all have Rashford.
He scored over 20 goals in consecutive seasons. There's a player in there somewhere.