Over the last week, Fantasy Football Scout site users have been voting on their favourite Fantasy Premier League goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders and forwards of 2020/21.
Overall score, points per match and value in FPL were all factors we considered when compiling our shortlist, with a total of 40 players up for nomination.
Our polls have now closed and we can reveal which players have made our end-of-season XI.
Our team of the year is set up in a 3-4-3, with Aston Villa (2), Leeds United (2), West Ham United (2), Tottenham Hotspur (2), Manchester City (1), Liverpool (1) and Manchester United (1) all represented.
And there wasn’t a single Chelsea asset in sight…
GOALKEEPER
It’s a landslide: in the least surprising result of our polls, Emiliano Martinez was the emphatic winner of the best goalkeeper ballot.
The Aston Villa custodian polled not far off 90% of the vote, with Illan Meslier a distant second.
Martinez not only finished as FPL’s highest-scoring shotstopper of 2020/21 but he also came within a whisker of breaking Brad Friedel’s record points total.
Friedel racked up 187 points all the way back in 2002/03, a tally that the Argentina international fell one point shy of.
The Aston Villa custodian did it all from a now-unthinkable starting price of £4.5m, and he was the best-value FPL asset in any position, returning 35.1 points per million spent.
He also had the best points-per-match average (4.9) of any first-choice goalkeeper.
DEFENDERS
There’s no surprise that Stuart Dallas topped the best defenders poll, with Aaron Cresswell also causing little stir by finishing second: the Leeds man was the highest-scoring player in his Fantasy position, with Cresswell the leading assist-maker among defenders.
Perhaps more eyebrow-raising was Cresswell’s teammate, Vladimir Coufal, pipping the likes of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Ruben Dias and John Stones into third.
The West Ham full-backs plundered a remarkable 20 assists between them this season and were responsible for almost a third of the goals that the Hammers scored.
Cresswell’s final total of 11 assists was among the highest ever in FPL, with only Liverpool’s current two full-backs beating that number in a single campaign.
Both West Ham players were among the top five FPL defenders for value (points per million) in 2020/21.
No defender with an initial cost of less than £5.0m has ever bettered Dallas’s total of 171 points, meanwhile.
The Northern Ireland international ticked an abundance of boxes: he was the only player in his position to play every single minute of the campaign, his total of eight goals was the joint-highest by a defender in FPL history and he boasted the best value (points per million) of any outfielder in 2020/21.
MIDFIELDERS
The top three highest-scoring midfielders in FPL were joined by Ilkay Gundogan in achieving a double-digit share of the ballot.
With up to five votes allowed for each site user in this position, Bruno Fernandes was nominated by the vast majority of those who had their say.
Mohamed Salah made the Team of the Season for the fourth straight year, while Son Heung-min survived the cut after his beating his previous best FPL campaign by a massive 50 points.
Son polled nearly twice as many votes as fifth-place Raphinha.
Fernandes racked up more double-figure Gameweek hauls (12) than any FPL asset en route to finishing top of the pile for FPL points on 244.
Despite posting his lowest overall total since joining Liverpool, Salah still registered more returns of 5+ points (20) than any other player.
Son actually matched the Egyptian for points per match (6.2) in 2020/21, with the Korean’s total of 28 attacking returns also exactly what Salah managed.
As for Gundogan, it’s safe to say we won’t see him at £5.5m again in 2021/22.
The Manchester City midfielder burst out of nowhere to rattle off 12 goals and three assists from Gameweeks 13 to 27, with that mid-season purple patch seeing his ownership climb from 19,000 to 3.1 million.
FORWARDS
Harry Kane and Patrick Bamford both mopped up the vote in the forwards’ poll, with Ollie Watkins narrowly seeing off Dominic Calvert-Lewin in the battle for third.
Kane, like Son, had his best-ever FPL season, registering 23 goals, 14 assists, 20 Gameweek returns, nine hauls and a 242-point total that was only a whisker away from toppling Bruno Fernandes from the overall summit.
Bamford defied pre-season expectations to finish 2020/21 as the second-highest scoring forward behind Kane, with his 17 goals and 11 assists leaving him only six points shy of the traditional elite FPL total of 200 points.
Watkins matched his fellow Championship alumnus stride-for-stride in terms of returns, but trailed Bamford on the really big scores, failing to add to the three he managed in the first 15 Gameweeks.
The budget-friendly pair finished the season as the two best-value forwards based on points per million spent.
2 years, 10 months ago
Pep roulette fail