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Hey guys, James here coming at you with an FPL season review.
I imagine this won’t be read very much when I post it as most normal people are taking a break or gearing up to Fantasy World Cup if they are real gluttons for punishment. But, I think its a valuable exercise for me and you when we come back in gameweek 1 for the 26/27 season so I am gonna do it anyway.
In this piece I am going to look at overall trends, team data, who scored FPL points and how defensive contributions changed the game. The purpose is to of course figure out if there is anything we can learn from this season and to make educated guesses about next year.
But first, a quick review of my season.
I finished 119k in the end. I dropped out of the top 100k on the final day of the season which was a hard one to take as I wasn’t able to pay attention to the last minute leaks on the day but I can’t say that I think I deserved to be in the top 100k.
Most of my frustration with myself comes from my terrible moves in the striker market, missing basically all of the Thiago and Joao Pedro goals and just making life more difficult for myself than necessary.
I also wasn’t aggressive enough at the end of the season with my transfers and had too many in the bank going into the final few games – something I hope to change next year. I didn’t even take one hit this year – madness.
Still, I can take heart from the fact that I finished in the top 1% of managers again. I was in the top 1% league from last season and only seventeen thousand of those managers beat me too. Plus, I only finished 10 points behind the legendary Fabio Borges in a season many of us found tough.
So, overall I am content. Boring bit done then, lets move on to the interesting, nerdy stuff.
You probably think that football was a little more turgid this season like me. But let’s see how it stacks up.
There were 1045 goals scored this season down from 1115 goals in the 24/25 season and 1246 goals in the 23/24 season. 23/24 saw the most goals in any premier league season ever. Yes, even the seasons with more than 20 teams in the league – although only just.
Goals Scored in a 20 Team/38 Game Premier League Season
So, this supports the turgid hypothesis as we can see that fewer goals were scored this season than last season. However, when you put it into context of the overall trends you can see that it’s not that far off from what we have seen for the previous ten years.
We also saw a corresponding number of clean sheets.
I don’t have stats going quite so far back on this one and I can’t be bothered to do any more digging as I am sure it will show pretty much the opposite to the goals scored chart above.
The slightly frustrating thing here then is that clean sheets are harder to come by than in the 21/22 and 22/23 season despite the fewer goals scored. In my mind that makes sense because there were very few whipping boys this season. Burnley and Wolves didn’t really lose big in many games despite only keeping eight clean sheets between them. And, without Southampton in the league nobody lost 7-0 on multiple occasions. Shame they won’t be back next year.
The folks over at the transfer flow (great podcast and analysis on their website by the way) put out this really interesting chart which shows that the gap between the top and bottom teams decreased this year. You can also see more teams clustered around the middle showing that there is greater convergence of quality.
Again, this backs up the point above about the lack of whipping boys in the PL. It’s hard to say before transfer season whether Coventry, Ipswich and Hull will struggle like Sheffield, Luton and Burnley in the 23/24 season shown above but its not that long ago that people like me were lamenting the difference in quality between the PL and Championship and thinking nobody would be able to get promoted and survive. I would be most worried for Hull in this regard who don’t have a big budget but if they are gonna get trounced at least we can get some FPL points off them.
I think this means we are firmly back in the realm of the normal. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see the goals scored number go up next year as teams will start to play differently, particularly as I don’t think any of the big teams can beat Arsenal at their own defensive game.
Regardless, expect goals to be back around that trend line next year and clean sheets to be around the 200 mark again. So, don’t go mad with your attack in gameweek 1 next season and be sure to pick a balanced team.
I think at least one of the promoted teams will struggle next year, probably two because as you can see Sunderland were incredibly lucky to finish as high as they did this season.
Let’s take a look at Team by Team data then before we jump into players. This is valuable information because it will inform our fixture ticker and help us identify which are good fixtures and which are bad.
Based on this, we can develop a very basic ranking of teams that we will build on for the ticker.
In this early ranking I have just ranked the 17 teams that will stay in the PL. The three promoted teams will likely be ranked 1s for both though Coventry may merit a 2 in attack based on their performance in the Championship.
We can see from Man United’s performance this year that teams without European football can do great things in the PL. Last season United had the 12th best xG and 13th best xGC, this season they finished 4th on both counts. With eight teams qualifying for European football from the Premier League we will have some decisions to make:
Arsenal and City will certainly have enough depth to compete in Europe and the Premier League. However, that depth means rotation and so we may struggle to find viable options again. Part of the reason for Arsenal’s success this season was that rotation so let’s hope others don’t follow suit and make it difficult for us to find nailed players.
Man Utd and Villa performed worse in the 24/25 PL season partly because of European football. Villa saw a small drop off but for United it was huge. I will be a bit wary of those teams then. Villa are particularly interesting because they and Morgan Rogers seem to defy xG stats.
Liverpool feel more like an unknown to me. I think they have enough depth in attack but I suspect Virgil will once again be the most trustworthy asset.
I really worry for Bournemouth, Sunderland and Palace in terms of their depth. Palace finished 15th in the PL this season after their run in the Conference League and Glasner often complained about a lack of depth. Neither Bournemouth nor Sunderland have great depth either.
Brighton will probably be fine but we will struggle to find nailed players. They have such a good player trading model that I trust them to find players or bring players from their massive roster. It will just be a case of finding nailed players.
Chelsea, Newcastle and Spurs are the three teams. Chelsea and Spurs have big budgets and Newcastle have mega wealthy owners. All of them need investment but all of them finished towards the top end of the middle of the pack defensively which I think we could expect to improve with fresher legs.
Chelsea finished 4th for xG this season which is frankly insane to me but you can see it in black and white above. Palmer will likely come in a bit cheaper next season and Joao Pedro will be a good pick up in easy fixture runs.
Newcastle finished 10th for xG after a dreadful summer transfer window. If they can fix the mistakes they made with the money they made from selling Gordon then they could be very interesting. Of course, we also need to know who the number one striker is…
Spurs were woeful in attack and finished 17th for xG. Though, it must be noted that they were without their best attackers from the season before – Maddison, Solanke and Kulusevski. I am a huge Maddison fan and if he can recapture his form from the 24/25 season where he got 9 goals and 8 assists in 52% of the available minutes then Spurs and he could be good options. I am a lot less confident in Spurs in general though.
Now we have a better idea of the overall goals and clean sheets in the season, let’s dive into the players who scored the points. I am going to look at the top 50 FPL points scorers from this season to do this.
The first thing to note is that there are more defenders on this list and fewer mids and forwards than last year. I know that’s not a surprise to those of us who have been playing all year but it’s interesting to see that defcons for defenders worked – it increased the pool of good picks in the game.
I don’t think we can blame FPL towers too much for the continued decline of forwards as we have seen that fewer goals have been scored overall. However, it may be time for them to review why forwards get fewer points for a goal and cost more than comparable mids.
It’s really interesting to me to see goalkeepers remain steady here with Pickford, Raya and the Brentford keeper all making another appearance on this list after last year. It’s a decision we will once again have to consider at the start of the season next year – do we pay an extra 1.0 or 1.5 to get one of the guys we know will be on this list at the end of the season? Or do we cross our fingers and hope we get one of the budget guys that will end up here?
This season we saw only three players break 200 points (Haaland, B. Fernandes and Gabriel) in comparison to last years five (Salah, Mbeumo, Palmer, Isak, Wood).
Premiums really failed to deliver this season. This could partly be down to injuries to Isak, Palmer and Saka as well as the overall decline in goals scored. Saka is 6th in the table of points per match but 24th overall for example. It could also be symptomatic of the fact that points appear more spread out this year – though I don’t have great data to demonstrate that other than to say you only needed 129 points to be on this list last season.
There were seven more players to score 150 points this season (26 this year vs 19 last year). I think that can be explained by defcons as 11 of this seasons 26 players to score 150 points got more than 20 defcon points.
MGW is on this list for the second time in two seasons. I am really interested in him next season, particularly as Forest won’t play European football next year.
I also need to accept that Morgan Rogers beats xG and xA – he is good and we should consider him.
Another probably obvious takeaway is that centre-backs dominate the top scorers. However, 5 of the 16 defenders listed above are full-backs so their death has been somewhat overstated. This could be interesting as I expect come gameweek 1 next season everyone will have five centre-backs in their team. If the fixtures align, I might do something different because people will probably undervalue full-backs.
This brings us to…
Okay, the topic everyone is most excited to talk about. Did Defcons change the game?
I already said that I think it did increase the pool of available players for us because it increased the number of good defensive picks. That’s good because this year you could have owned 16 great defenders as opposed to 9. Of course, almost all of these guys were centre-backs (apart from Truffert) which is a little dull but attacking full-backs were few and far between in the league this year anyway.
Looking at this table then, you can see that the non-premium defences benefitted the most from DefCons and it turned players like Tarko into guys you could hold all season long, rather than buy and sell for good fixture runs.
In terms of midfielders, I don’t think DefCons changed that much. Anderson, Garner, Rice and Casemiro were the only defcon beasts to beat 150 points. I am defining a DefCon beast as someone who got more than 26 DefCon points.
It is better to think of DefCons for midfielders as a complement to attacking returns, not a substitute. Rice and Casemiro both got 13 attacking returns too and that was why they were good. Szoboszlai got 20 defcon points and also got 13 attacking returns too. Despite all the expectations Bruno Fernandes only got 10 defcons – that was the same as Saka.
The only midfielders that relied on Defcons and were viable picks were Garner and Anderson. And, in my opinion, that’s fun to have guys who have a different route to points.
I thought I was going to come into this section saying that we needed to up the DefCon threshold but looking at the data I actually think we probably don’t.
FPL Towers already said that when they backtested this, DefCons weren’t nearly as powerful and I suspect next season they won’t be because of that reason. This may be a statistical outlying season.
So, they could probably just deal with it by increasing prices for these guys.
For the defenders in particular, we will need to examine the price of a Tarko or Senesi and ask ourselves if we are comfortable to hold them all season long instead of chopping and changing our cheaper defenders for good fixture runs.
We should also be thinking about playing 4-4-2 or maybe even 5-3-2 and just using our transfers to target the best fixtures for our attackers.
This year we got two sets of chips for the first time and I loved it. It was something I called for at the end of last season because chips are fun and it could lessen their power overall. So, let’s take a look at them.
There were no double gameweeks in the first half of the season so we had to play them in singles.
I played all my first half chips within the first seven weeks because I wanted to be really aggressive coming into the season. Being able to wildcard out of a team that had a bit too much money on the bench and was optimally set up to exploit five games (I free hit one of the weeks) worked out really well for me.
I will do the same next year. Not only because it was successful but it was great to get rid of thinking about bench boost. And, to start the season really well felt like it took a lot of the pressure off.
Once again there were fewer double gameweeks and fewer doubling teams. That meant that we were playing FPL on rails as the good picks were really obvious.
I didn’t find it that fun and I didn’t do that well either – possibly because I had quite a differential team for most of the season according to fploptimized.com.
At the end of the season we tend to start looking at our ranks and thinking about taking more or less risk to get to the rank we want or to win our mini-leagues but maybe we should be taking those risks earlier in the season – the overall winner captained Tarkowski in his first game of the season for example.
I think that’s enough, don’t you?
Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far. Hopefully when we’re all frantically building Gameweek 1 drafts in a couple of months’ time, there’ll be at least one useful takeaway here that helps us avoid repeating the mistakes of 2025/26.
See you at the start of next season.
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