Drawing on this week’s Scout Squad submissions by Marc, Sam, Tom F and Tom J, we’ve finalised our Scout Picks selections for Fantasy Premier League (FPL) Gameweek 13.
As ever, there are certain restrictions for our picks:
- An £83.0m budget for our starting XI
- An overall squad limit of £100.0m
- No more than three players per team
GAMEWEEK 13 SCOUT PICKS
GOALKEEPER
Between the posts this week, Guglielmo Vicario (£5.0m) gets a shot at redemption despite conceding nine times in two matches this past week. To be fair to the Tottenham Hotspur stopper, those games have been away to Premier League leaders Arsenal and Champions League holders Paris Saint-Germain, whereas this weekend brings a home tie against 15th-placed Fulham, whose only wins against sides above themselves in the table – Sunderland and Brentford – have come on their own turf.
Only two clubs – Leeds United and Wolverhampton Wanderers – have scored fewer goals than the Cottagers (13) and Marco Silva’s men rank similarly low for shots on target this season, managing just 39. Meanwhile, from opposition shots on target, Vicario has already prevented 3.50 goals, the second-most of any goalkeeper.
DEFENDERS
Daniel Munoz (£5.9m) keeps his spot in the backline having been backed by three of our Scout Squad panel. The Crystal Palace wing-back is near-fixture proof thanks to his attacking threat – he ranks second among defenders for both expected goals (xG) and expected assists (xA) – as illustrated by last weekend’s 14-point haul, and the Eagles will be keen to bounce back from a midweek Conference League disappointment when they host a Manchester United side that has conceded more Opta-defined ‘big chances’ on the road this season than any other club. Impressively, Munoz has managed an FPL return of some kind – at least one of a clean sheet, goal involvement or defensive contribution (DefCon) points – in nine of his 12 outings so far.
It will be of little surprise that Nico O’Reilly (£5.1m) has made it into this week’s Scout Picks, given our four-strong in-house panel selected him as the unanimous top-choice defender for Gameweek 13. He’s made the Manchester City left-back spot his own recently, has three attacking returns from his latest four starts (plus nine shots over the last five Gameweeks, the most of any defender), and was rested – alongside the majority of Pep Guardiola’s seemingly first-choice crew – during the midweek Champions League loss to Bayer Leverkusen. It also helps that City have the Gameweek’s best clean sheet odds, with opponents Leeds having been fairly toothless in front of goal away from home, scoring just four goals (three of which came against last-placed Wolves).
Continuing our theme of attack-minded defenders, Matty Cash (£4.6m) is Aston Villa’s top-scoring Fantasy asset. Unai Emery’s ever-present right-back has scored twice and earned five bonus points this season on top of his four clean sheets (two of them in his last two home games); those are all tallies which he has a strong chance of adding to given Wolves’ struggles at both ends of the pitch. In terms of his underlying statistics, Cash has fired off the second-most shots of any defender over the last six Gameweeks, created 10 chances for his teammates this season and pinged in 51 crosses, the fifth-most among FPL defenders.
Brentford centre-half Sepp van den Berg (£4.5m) earns our final starting defender spot. The budget-friendly Dutchman has registered 12 DefCon points in the opening 12 Gameweeks, is the only defender with three or more big chances to not yet score, and is the position’s biggest xG underachiever (-1.50).
MIDFIELDERS
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