We’re almost getting to the point of the campaign when we start thinking about the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) team of the year.
While awards season is yet to start in earnest, the lull of the international break has given us time to ponder about another group of players: the biggest disappointments of 2024/25.
And so, a few weeks after the 45th Golden Raspberry Awards, here’s our own run-through of the most underwhelming Fantasy XI of this season – so far.
The decidedly unscientific approach involves looking at things like overall score and points per match but also price and reputation/expectation coming into this campaign.
Let us know what you think in the comments – are there any glaring omissions, or have we condemned anyone unfairly?
GOALKEEPER
Emiliano Martínez
Between the sticks, we’ve selected Emiliano Martínez (£5.0m).
Is the World Cup winner one of the planet’s best goalkeepers on his day? Yes. But Dibu has made some costly errors at times this season. He also has failed to make up for other defensive lapses in the rest of Aston Villa’s leaky backline, which has kept only four clean sheets in 29 attempts. Only the bottom three sides have fewer shut-outs.
There are just five teams who have a worse goals conceded total than the Villans’ 45, too.
His total expected goals prevented figure is currently negative (-1.40), while a save rate of 65.8% is on the low side.
Overall, he has scored fewer points per match (2.6) than almost all starting Premier League ‘keepers, including the likes of Southampton’s Aaron Ramsdale (£4.4m) and Wolves’ José Sá (£4.3m).
Poor value at £5.0m, you wonder if FPL will lower his starting price in 2025/26 unless there’s a significant upturn in form in the spring.
DEFENDERS
Leif Davis
A bit harsh?
We certainly weren’t expecting Leif Davis (£4.3m) to be the second coming of Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.4m) in his debut Premier League season with likely strugglers Ipswich.
This entry is more of a ‘what might have been’, based on his previous seasons’ performances – albeit in the lower division – and subsequent pre-season expectations compared to his output so far.
In the 2023/24 Championship season, for example, Davis managed two goals and a whopping 18 assists. That was no fluke, either, with the former Leeds full-back having scored three and assisted 14 goals the campaign prior.
Alfie Doughty’s 10 attacking returns for a similarly leaky Luton Town in 2023/24 had set the high bar… and Davis has fallen well short of it. Just one goal and two assists so far, with no attacking returns since Gameweek 10. In that intervening time, he’s averaged 1.1 points per match.
His teammates need to shoulder a lot of the blame for this entry. Davis has created 53 chances this season, the most of all FPL defenders, and 12 Opta-defined ‘big chances’.
Ultimately, though, we ruthless FPL managers judge a player partly on his output. A total of five returns – just one of which has been registered in his last 19 matches – is certainly below what many FPL bosses, and likely Davis himself, would have expected coming into this season.
From touted for an England call-up to calls for Conor Townsend (£3.9m) to come in at left-back/wing-back…
Kieran Trippier
From one full-back who hasn’t quite yet managed to maintain his output at the top level, to one whose decline from the heights of FPL stardom has been marked.
Kieran Trippier (£5.6m) is far from an unfamiliar name to the Premier League and FPL. His last two seasons at Newcastle since returning from Spain were his most productive yet.
The 34-year-old England international managed a goal in each of his 2022/23 and 2023/24 campaigns. There were also 10 assists and six clean sheets (from his 26 starts) last season, and nine assists and 16 clean sheets the year prior.
The walls started to crashing down when he was named on the bench for the Magpies’ season opener, the younger Tino Livramento (£4.5m) preferred by Eddie Howe at right-back.
Livramento hasn’t provided nearly the same level of creativity as Lewis Hall (£4.8m) on the opposite flank or Trippier in years gone by but he’s still done enough to limit the increasingly injury-prone full-back to just seven league starts, only two of which have come in 2025.
Trippier, who started off the season at £6.0m, has also yet to deliver a single league attacking return this campaign.
However, could there be a fairytale end to Trippier’s campaign? With Hall and Sven Botman (£4.4m) injured, the Newcastle defence almost picks itself at present. The veteran Trippier was superb in the EFL Cup final on Sunday, assisting the Magpies’ opener.
With a Double Gameweek 32 to come and some decent fixtures around, could we see Trippier having an FPL swansong?
Jarell Quansah
Finally, a name that was the talk of the town last summer, but has long since been forgotten – or purposefully banished from memory – in FPL circles: Jarrell Quansah (£3.9m).
Liverpool’s young centre-back featured heavily in the Reds’ pre-season antics, with his style of play touted as another reason why Arne Slot may be handing FPL managers the gift of a starting £4.5m defender in a title-challenging team.
The hype lasted all of 45 minutes in Gameweek 1. Quansah was subbed at half-time, his opportunity and our dreams of a budget-friendly Liverpool defender evidently squandered. That was the last we saw of Quansah – whose price continued to plummet – in the league until a brief cameo in Gameweek 13’s win over Manchester City.
Since the opening, the 22-year-old has only started once in the top flight.
Much like Trippier, there could be a redemption arc in the run-in. Alexander-Arnold and Joe Gomez (£4.7m) may be out for the medium term, while the latest update on Conor Bradley (£4.7m) didn’t make it sound like a return was imminent.
Honourable mentions
Our first honourable mention is Ian Maatsen (£4.5m), the young ex-Chelsea left-back who many expected to usurp Lucas Digne (£4.5m) in Unai Emery’s XI.
Maatsen has by no means performed poorly when given opportunities, it’s more that he’s had limited chances: about 600 league minutes, with just four starts. Digne meanwhile has pretty much kept his place and delivered five assists, although he and the rest of the Villa backline have underwhelmed on the clean sheet front.
Can we class Rico Lewis (£4.3m) as a disappointment? His case is a peculiar one, with the uncostly Manchester City full-back appearing to have nailed down a starting spot in Pep Guardiola’s team (save for the occasional bout of rotation, of course).
Lewis, having ousted veteran teammate Kyle Walker from the starting line-up (and eventually the Premier League entirely), delivered two attacking returns – a pair of assists – in his first six starts and was perhaps unlucky not to register more.
But when the defending champions’ form started to slip, so too did Lewis’s. A string of one and zero-point performances were followed by a whiplash-inducing Gameweek 15, which combined his first league goal of the season with a red card. That dismissal all but erased the young right-back from the majority of FPL managers’ thoughts and plans. Accordingly, Lewis has now lost £0.6m off his peak FPL price, having started only three of City’s last nine league outings.
Lastly, should Andrew Robertson (£5.8m) be included over Quansah above? While the Scot has delivered nine clean sheets this season, he’s registered a big fat zero attacking returns. Now the occasional rotation risk, he’s averaged just 2.8 points per match this season, well outside the top 30 for defenders.
MIDFIELDERS
Christopher Nkunku
As with Quansah in the previous section, Christopher Nkunku (£5.7m) feels as good a place to start as any for the midfield unit of this disappointing XI.
“Hang on!”, I hear you say. “Didn’t he just haul in Gameweek 27?”
He did indeed, but consider this: Nkunku has two double-digit hauls this season, and both of them came against Southampton, the league’s worst side. The Frenchman bagged a goal and assist in each of those matches, but has scored on just one other occasion this season, and has registered no other assists.
That recent haul, despite being backed by promising underlying statistics, and his overall output comes nowhere close to the level of expectation that was drummed up around Nkunku last summer. After excelling for much of Chelsea’s pre-season, there were hopes that an out-of-position forward option may even have emerged from the mid-priced midfielders bracket. Based on the available evidence at the time, there were even reasonable ponderings over whether he could negate the need for a drastically marked-up Cole Palmer (£10.8m) in our starting squads.
Naturally, all of those hopes were quickly dashed when Nkunku, having been hooked before the hour mark in Chelsea’s season-opening loss, was benched for the Gameweek 2 mauling of Wolves. Panic ensued, he was sold en masse, and the benchings continued.
Nkunku next started a league match in Gameweek 14, against Saints, and was then – aside from one start in the Gameweek 19 loss to Ipswich – restricted to substitute appearances until the recent injury to Nicolas Jackson (£7.7m) re-opened the door for him to start the Blues’ last five. With Jackson and Noni Madueke (£6.0m) expected back after the break, he’ll likely be warming the bench again soon.
Leon Bailey
After a stellar season in 2023/24, it’s fair to say Leon Bailey (£6.2m) has failed to live up to expectations so far in the current league campaign.
The Jamaican winger proved to be an excellent value selection last season, with double digits for both league goals (10) and assists (11) earning him a deserved price hike and plenty of pre-season attention from an FPL standpoint.
This time around, though, a Gameweek 3 injury derailed what had been a promising (if unproductive) start to the season. Bailey has worked his way back into Emery’s XI from time to time but a few lacklustre performances combined with Villa’s growing surplus of attacking talent have seen his opportunities largely limited in the league, with the likes of Morgan Rogers (£5.5m) and now newcomers Marco Asensio (£6.1m), Marcus Rashford (£6.7m) and Donyell Malen (£5.4m) providing heavy competition, the majority of them at a lower price point.
Bailey has started 14 of his side’s 29 Premier League outings so far, coming off the bench on a further nine occasions for a respectable total of 1,131 minutes. His tally of attacking returns, however, still stands at just three, courtesy of two assists in the first nine Gameweeks and a single goal against Leicester in Gameweek 20.
There’s still plenty of time to turn things around, as evidenced by his well-taken Champions League knock-out stage goal last week, but so far this will likely go down as one of Bailey’s more forgettable seasons.
Hwang Hee-chan
It’s a very similar story for Hwang Hee-chan (£6.1m) at Wolves. The versatile South Korean enjoyed his most productive Premier League campaign last season, finishing with 12 goals and three assists from his 25 starts. He scored at a pretty ruthless rate.
A few injuries have held him back from more appearances this season, including one just last month. But, even when available, Hwang’s game-time has been impacted by the arrival of a few new faces at Molineux, including Jørgen Strand Larsen (£5.3m). The Norwegian striker’s presence has reduced the need for Hwang to lead the line as he has at times previously, while Matheus Cunha (£6.9m) has been able to carry much of both the creative and goalscoring loads himself.
It means Hwang has only five league starts and 600 minutes to his name this season, along with two goals and an assist.
Even Cunha’s suspension hasn’t led to increased minutes.
Phil Foden
Speaking of last season, few players had a better campaign than Phil Foden (£9.2m). He earned plenty of plaudits having scored a career-high 19 goals and assisted eight more as City secured their historic fourth straight league title.
But after being involved with England’s European efforts late into last summer’s pre-season, the 24-year-old was eased – very slowly – back into City’s set-up at the start of this season.
Foden was essentially a non-option for the first half of this campaign. He failed to start a match until Gameweek 7 and then delivered zero goals or assists in six subsequent outings when he was given a starting berth. That all meant he hadn’t found the back of the net until Gameweek 17’s consolation effort in City’s loss to Villa.
Those struggles were soon largely forgotten during an impressive five-match run after that, which saw Foden score six more goals and assist another two. Since Gameweek 24, however, it’s been back to blanks.
To be fair, City have played Arsenal, Newcastle, Liverpool, Spurs, Nottingham Forest and Brighton in their last six matches, and the difficulty of their schedule is about to ease up considerably.
But, even with that fixture turn, he’s struggling to nail down a starting spot. Omar Marmoush (£7.3m) has been mostly excellent since his arrival, starring in Foden’s preferred ’10’ role in Gameweek 29. The England man was only a substitute.
Compared to last season and indeed his several years before that, this campaign has yet to experience much of Foden’s magic.
Martin Ødegaard
The same can be said for Martin Ødegaard (£8.2m), but for slightly different reasons.
Arsenal’s Norwegian playmaker succumbed to an ankle injury mere weeks into the season, ultimately missing two months and seven league matches’ worth of action.
He impressed immediately on his return, delivering attacking returns (two assists and a goal) in three straight outings. However, he has been pretty quiet in the weeks since, delivering just one more goal and two assists in 14 league appearances.
The absence of Bukayo Saka (£10.2m) has undoubtedly had a significant impact on the way the Gunners play, and likely to some degree on Ødegaard’s output as well. The same can be said now of Arsenal’s lack of a recognised striker – not that that seemed to hinder them much against PSV, a match in which Ødegaard scored two goals and assisted another.
But in the league thus far, this season looks set to mark another drop from his high of 212 FPL points (thanks to 15 goals and eight assists) two seasons ago, and 186 points (eight goals, 11 assists) in 2023/24. He currently has 76 points, with two goals and four assists.
As we discussed in pre-season, the ‘feast or famine’ routine is actually nothing new for Arsenal’s captain. Odegaard blanked in 22 of his 35 appearances last season but still delivered more double-digit hauls (nine) than anyone except Palmer.
This season, however, the dial has certainly shifted more towards ‘famine’ so far: 15 blanks and zero double-digit hauls from his 21 outings.
Honourable mentions
Alejandro Garnacho (£5.9m) was very close to making the XI. A £5.0m gem last season, a price rise to £6.5m has not been matched by a rise in output. In fact, he’s delivered just seven attacking returns in 2024/25 compared to 14 in the previous campaign.
Successive contributions in the last two Gameweeks has at least raised some optimism that he can end this season on a high.
An honourable mention in midfield also goes to Mohammed Kudus (£6.2m). His mazy dribbles and relatively strong underlying numbers have yet to amount to much consistent end product, particularly compared to last season.
Three goals and two assists in 24 starts has been a disappointing return.
And then there’s Kevin De Bruyne (£9.3m). Ten attacking returns (two goals and eight assists) paper over the cracks of this once sensational, now ageing playmaker’s saddening decline – a downfall his manager is clearly all too aware of, given the Belgian has started just once in City’s last seven league matches since his hat-trick of assists against Ipswich.
With a summer 2025 move expected, could we have one last flirtation with the Belgian in Gameweek 38 a la David Silva? We all know how that one turned out…
Of all the midfield ‘regulars’ costing £6.5m or more, Eberechi Eze (£6.7m) shares the lowest points-per-start average (3.8) with Odegaard. His minutes from the last two campaigns are almost level (1,925 in 2024/25 versus 2,054 in 2023/24) but he’s got only half the number of attacking returns this season as he did last (8 v 16).
With Southampton up next and a Double Gameweek 32 to come, perhaps he can yet kickstart his year.
FORWARDS
Rasmus Højlund
Despite his goal on Sunday, Rasmus Højlund (£6.9m), the young Danish striker is the first name in our Disappointing XI’s frontline.
Joshua Zirkzee (£6.5m) could have easily joined him, although the Dutchman has delivered more attacking returns in fewer starts.
Højlund, meanwhile, has registered just three goals and one assist from his 17 starts (and 24 total appearances) in the league this season. The Dane’s rate of 72 minutes per chance (see below table) is the third-worst of any FPL forward, as he has only had 20 attempts all season long. Just nine of those have been on target, too.
Nottingham Forest’s full-back Neco Williams (£4.4m), among others, is shooting at a faster rate than Hojlund…
Staggeringly, Højlund’s goal against Leicester City was his first return since Gameweek 15.
Dominic Solanke
Lastly, we arrive at Dominic Solanke (£7.3m).
Like a few names on this list, Solanke’s first season at Spurs has been interrupted by a series of injuries and ailments, which have restricted him to 20 league starts.
Are we harshly judging him, then? Maybe not if we consider that, even when fit, his average points per start (4.4) is worse than the other nine forwards costing more than £7.0m.
This has been another case of not quite living up to the expectations (rightly or wrongly) placed on him before the season had begun.
Those expectations, based on what appeared to be a perfect fit in Ange Postecoglou’s team, were also understandably heightened by his 19-goal campaign with Bournemouth just a year ago, even though Solanke’s previous season-best goals tally was six.
Things haven’t quite panned out as he might have hoped so far, leading to his place in this team of underwhelmers, but his imminent return from injury alongside a few other key names for the Lilywhites could give him time to change the narrative by the end of the season.
Honourable mentions
Can you really be a disappointment if expectations are at the basement level? Darwin Nunez (£7.0m) and Dominic Calvert-Lewin (£5.4m) have long been given short shrift by FPL managers (although there was again another dalliance with the Everton man earlier this season!), so their combined tally of eight league goals isn’t really much of a shock.
Expectations weren’t exactly sky-high for 38-year-old Jamie Vardy (£5.3m), either, so seven goals is probably about par.
Kai Havertz (£7.7m) perhaps hasn’t lived up to the levels he set at the back-end of 2023/24 but had injury not struck, he may well have beaten last season’s total of 13 league goals regardless.
FINAL XI
