With Fantasy Premier League (FPL) live for 2025/26, we’re welcoming back our team of guest writers for the new campaign.
Here, three-time top 200 finisher Lateriser shares his initial thoughts on defenders and puts together a first draft.
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“Nothing underpins our society more than the promise of what the future could be.”
An appropriate quote from a book I’m reading right now, Anxious People by Friedrich Bachmann…
The new season is upon us and the game is back, albeit with some new flashy clothes. We’ll save how we feel about those changes for later but let’s get into some early thoughts.
I’ll be focusing this article on defence and talk about broader chip strategy in the upcoming articles.
DEFENSIVE CONTRIBUTION POINTS: PAY ATTENTION TO OPPOSITION TEAMS
There are a few thoughts I have about defensive contribution (DC) points.
The first obvious thing is that centre-backs are back! This increases the player pool we have available to us, especially when we’re looking at middling to lower-level opposition.
And depending on the opposition, your defender may have a better/worse chance of hitting the 10 clearances, blocks, interceptions and tackles (CBIT) threshold and securing two defensive contribution points. This could also be an opposition play-style thing and not just an opposition strength thing.
Look at this lovely table from FPL_TomHadley:
So, this means that if your centre-back plays the teams at the top, it isn’t the worst thing for the DC points prospect. Everton and Crystal Palace like to cross a fair bit so centre-halves playing against them will invariably have to make more clearances, hence boosting their CBIT tallies.
The defensive contributions made by left-backs against Mohamed Salah (£14.5m) are chuckle-worthy, not going to lie.
VAN DIJK THE PICK OF THE PREMIUMS
