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Greetings all, and welcome to…
*Sniff, sniff* Oh, gosh, here I go again… I really didn’t think this was going to happen, this time!
Excuse me. I’m okay, really.
As I (Joe) was saying – welcome to the very last article we’ll write for the season.
Our penultimate piece looked at our least favourite (i.e. MOST HATED) FPL players from 25-26. You can peruse that overwhelming barrage of negativity right here.
To balance out said negativity, however, we thought we should say some nice things too. Behold, therefore – our actual favourite (i.e. most loved – aww) picks from the 25-26 season.
It was a lot easier to pick the players I’ve hated this season, let me tell you.
After giving it a quite embarrassing amount of thought, however, these were the players who – mostly through their FPL prowess, but sometimes from real-life affection – sprinkled a little joy across my team this year.
‘Ooh, you picked the best, most obvious striker in the game! You’re smart!’ I hear you sarcastically cry.
Well, firstly – obvious as it might look now – Haaland wasn’t a universal pick to start the season, since he was so ridiculously expensive (though, ultimately, proved worth the price regardless).
More importantly, though, Haaland has been transferred out a lot this season.
The debate has been raging all year on FPL Reddit, about whether it was time to bin him or not – as, like all forwards, he went through a few down patches. Between Gameweeks 24 and 29, his net transfers were a whopping -1.4 million!
I give myself at least a little pat on the back, therefore, for never losing the faith. He’s been in my team for 36 out of the 37 gameweeks thus far. I believe I only transferred him out for either a blank, or before getting him straight back on a wildcard, for one single week.
I said I was going to back him, come what may, and I did. And I got a hell of a lot of points for doing so!
(Also, I absolutely hate captaincy in general. So I very much enjoyed that – for long stretches this season – he rendered it obsolete; so much so that we even renamed the Captaincy Corner section of our weekly preview in his honour).
This was the year I finally, at long last, decided to stop messing around with goalkeepers.
Literally every other season, I’ve subscribed to the ‘save on your keepers’ strategy. They only have one consistent route to points – clean sheets – and they’re normally quite hard to predict.
That strategy can work, if you get it right, but it’s also a massive headache. Almost exactly halfway through the season I decided I was sick of messing around with the Kellehers, Verbruggens, and Dubravkas of this world, and decided to simply splash out for the most expensive keeper by far, who also happened to be the best keeper by far.
He’s now been in my team for 19 straight gameweeks, and he’s currently the top scoring keeper by a 25pt margin.
Most importantly of all though, it has been just lovely not to have to think about this position once, for a whole half of the season. That, alone, was worth the price of admission.
Regular readers, who’ve been along for the ride through 2025-26, will know I’ve got a special place in my heart for my darling Minteh.
I watched a lot of Brighton early in the season, and quickly became a little bit obsessed. I love him as a real-life player – I think he’s rapid, relentless, and one of, if not the best crossers in the league.
So, I took a bit of a flyer on him in FPL too. He was cheap as chips, at only 6.0, and had very low ownership.
He immediately went on a little run, between Gameweeks 4-6, getting an assist, a goal, then an assist. He slipped off for the next couple of games, admittedly, then bounced back with five assists in his next four games.
Since then, he hasn’t been as great, and I reluctantly moved on.
Has he been an explosive points-getter, a real world-beater? No. But getting him in – based purely on the eye test, conducted by yours truly – and it paying off at least for a little while, was probably the most rewarding experience I had in FPL this season.
Even longer-term readers may well remember that I absolutely love Bowen.
In real-life, I think he’s fantastic. He plays hard, every single match, regardless of how bad his team is (normally pretty bad). He takes a lot of shots, but isn’t selfish, and has excellent technique. I just really, really enjoy watching him.
He’s also been one of my favourite FPL players for years now. I doubt a season has gone by, since he came to the Prem, when I haven’t owned him for at least one stretch.
He’s exactly the kind of player that I like in FPL – the anti-Cole Palmer (see my Most Hated Players for all the meaning on that front), tending to spread his returns out on a regular basis, rather than relying on random bursts of points, meaning he’s a lot more useful to actually own.
That’s why I backed him in the preseason, arguing that – while West Ham would probably be rubbish again (which they were) – it didn’t matter, since he always returned anyway.
This hasn’t been his best season, necessarily. He has still ended up getting 20 goal involvements anyway, in a side which has been godawful for most of the season. Assuming West Ham get relegated, he’ll probably end up on a team I don’t like, and I won’t be able to root for him any more (see: Antoine Semenyo). If and when that does happen, at least we’ll always have this one, final, heroic one-man-band act to look back upon.
I didn’t even have to think about this one. The whole article has basically been an excuse to talk about him. I don’t know how many dozens of WhatsApp messages I’ve sent James this year, singing his praises.
It’s Elliot Anderson – easily.
This guy came into the season priced at 5.5, and even now is only 5.7. His ownership is still only 8.4%. And he’s ended up as the 5th-highest scoring midfielder in the game.
The only players above him are Bruno, Semenyo, Rice, and Gibbs-White. Rice is the cheapest of those, at 7.2 – i.e. still 1.5 more than Anderson – and he only got 6 more points.
Every season, we see one great enabler emerge. We’ve had 4.0 keepers worth starting. Tammy Abraham’s breakthrough year at Chelsea. Our lord and saviour John Lundstram, from the Covid season. Morgan Rogers last year, at 5.0.
Obviously, he’s not taking the crown of Cole Palmer in 23/24, who started at 5.0, and ended up with 35 goal involvements (ah, the good old days). But I would definitely argue he’s our enabler king for this season.
Elsewhere, did I mention that I like reliable players? Well, Anderson has been the poster boy for the big new innovation for this season – DefCons. That, in turn, has given him an excellent floor. He’s averaged an absolutely ridiculous 13.94 DefCons/90 across the year. That’s meant you could basically stick him in your team, and reasonably expect a floor of around 4pts.
It got to the point where I didn’t even think about taking him out of my starting lineup – I could take as many more adventurous picks as I liked in the rest of the team, but I absolutely loved having that solid, locked in 4-5pts from a player. Between Gameweeks 19 and 27, he literally didn’t score fewer than 4pts one single time (he even got 7pts in Gameweek 24 despite not getting an attacking return). Perfect.
He’s also bailed me out in the flukiest of fashions, on multiple occasions. I bench boosted in GW11, for example, got absolutely nothing out of the first three players on my bench… only for Anderson, like Superman, to swoop in, right on cue, and bail me out with a 90th minute penalty.
Like Bowen, he’ll move to another real-life team next season, and probably won’t be as effective. He’ll certainly get a big price rise in FPL.
That’s fine. I’ve had my fun. He’s been in my side for 29/37 gameweeks so far, and I’ll enjoy one last ride with him as I make it a nice, round 30.
This is going to be a list of players that I like AND I was smart enough to call correctly to be good FPL picks. As with my least favourite players, this is really a list looking at my own decision-making. But this time, I get to be smug about them.
An easy start then as I pick the number one scoring defender in the game and second best performer in terms of points-per-match (behind Haaland of course).
At the start of the season I had him just behind Virgil as the best defender in his price bracket, as I didn’t see him picking up DefCons as much as he did.
Regretfully then, I picked Virgil in my first eleven, but I eventually picked him up in gameweek 10, dropped him because of his injury, and then had him for the rest of the season.
He has been a stalwart of my team, with 21 appearances and 162 points for me. The only reason he isn’t considered more important is because he was also in your team, so he didn’t gain me that much. I can forgive him for failing as my triple captain, for all he has given my team.
And another easy one, I suppose, with the number one midfielder in the game.
Unlike Gabriel, at the start of the season I said Bruno Fernandes was “easily the best pick in this [7.5-9.0] bracket”, and boy did he deliver. (If you click the link, ignore the bit where I waxed lyrical about Mo Salah and Cole Palmer, okay?).
Like Gabriel though, I started the season without him, as I was trying to squeeze Saka in. And that luckily paid off for me, as he missed a couple of penalties, so I don’t even have that to be annoyed at with him.
He delivered 232 points for me, with 7 captaincies in 23 appearances. Goals, assists and defcons – the perfect midfielder. He is gonna be expensive next year…
Long-time readers of this blog will know of my love for Semenyo. At the start of the season I called him the best midfielder in his price bracket, and I have basically been a huge fan since a little into last season.
He is the second highest scoring midfielder in the game, but he only delivered 120 points for me over 19 games. The reason for this is that I owned him throughout his whole time at Bournemouth, but I sold him just before he went to Man City – I didn’t want to deal with the rotation headache.
That was clearly a mistake – I should have waited to see how he fit in with his new team before committing to a move. I expect I won’t start the season with him next year if Pep leaves, because we won’t know for sure if he is nailed, but what a ride it has been.
Not to keep banging on about it, but I called him as “the most interesting” mid at the 5.5 price at the start of the season.
I started my season with him, and actually dropped him because he kept getting close but not getting defcons.
In the end, he only played 13 times for me, getting 52 points, and sitting on my bench 6 times. He is a big regret of mine – I should have just played him every week, but the price point kept convincing me it couldn’t continue. That was really stupid, because price doesn’t indicate quality.
In my last week, I expect to use a transfer to bring him in, just for the sake of the fact that I think he is brilliant.
My favourite player of the season has to be James Tarkowski.
He is currently the 5th highest scoring defender in the game, with 167 points and 4.6 points per game. He has been in my team 26 times this season, and is second only to Haaland in that department.
The reason I hold him in such high regard is that he did exactly what I thought and wanted him to do at the start of the season. I said back then: “I am prepared to go out on a limb and say James Tarkowski will be one of the most highly-owned defenders going into gameweek 1. The fact he tops the list [of players who get Def Cons] 4 seasons in a row combined with Everton’s defensive prowess is enough for me.”
So, I was wrong about his high ownership, but right to think he was a great pick – and that means I can be smug, which is a great reason to pick him as my MVP. The fact that he wasn’t particularly highly-owned all season worked to my benefit too, and his consistent returns helped me to get my decent rank.
It seems only fitting that in the year of the DefCon, this DefCon monster and others are all in my list. It leads me to think they will either amend DefCons, or increase the prices of these guys or both next season. And we will need to think about how we respond to that.
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Actually, reading this list of picks that I called great at the start of the season fills me with smugness and arrogance. How am I only 98k you may ask? Well, go back and read the least favourite players and you will soon see.
Right-o. That’ll not only do it for this article, but for the 25-26 season as a whole.
(Probably… let’s see how much James and I miss FPL, in the gap between this weekend and the World Cup).
Assuming that’s it for now, James and I both want to say a big thank you for visiting this site – whether it was just for this article, you’re a recent arrival, or you’ve been with us for a while. We’ve actually had a number of very nice responses, across the season, which has warmed those little hearts of ours which have been battered and bruised so many times by FPL over the years.
So, for the last time – thanks for reading, everybody.
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