Introducing… Tom Hadley!
Tom – a one-time world number one in FPL – is the newest addition to our ever-growing team of contributors for 2025/26.
He’ll be providing data-driven Members’ articles every week this season, starting with this one on defensive contribution (DC) points.
So, if you needed any extra incentive to sign up for the upcoming campaign, this is another subscriber bonus!
Don’t forget that you can still get an extra 5% off a Chief Scout membership, on top of the 40% existing discount, with the code TEAMSCOUT5.
SIGN UP HERE
Defensive contributions. DC. “DEFCON”.
FPL’s game-changing addition is the talk of pre-season. Perhaps there’s method in all the madness, or perhaps there’s simply no beating the old-school premium defender.
First, let’s run the numbers from last year.
HOW ‘DC’ POINTS AFFECTED THE OVERALL RANKINGS LAST SEASON
The below table comes from a great Fantasy Football Scout tool, available for Chief Scout members, which recalculates all the FPL 2024/25 points based on DC points, the bonus changes and any extra assists:
There is a very notable impact on the overall defensive rankings as a consequence of defensive contributions.
Josko Gvardiol (£6.0m), last year’s top-scoring defender, would have subsequently dropped to fourth in the rankings.
Meanwhile, the five best defenders for contributions all feature in the top 10 overall scorers.
It’s safe to say that defensive contributions present huge potential value across an entire season, but the real question is whether they still make for good picks across shorter periods. Do they still provide enough upside?
There are, of course, no guarantees that this year’s results will directly correlate to last year’s data. Teams can set up differently and there’s a wealth of new transfers alongside a couple of managerial changes. But it’s all we have to go off for now, and the results definitely indicate that certain players thrive more than others.
Two graphics stand out most crucially.
DEFCON POINTS WHILE KEEPING CLEAN SHEETS
