New rules are going to change the way we play Fantasy Premier League - so how do we pick defenders now?
We’re getting closer and closer to a brand new season, and with it the long-awaited return of Fantasy Premier League – and this year, two huge changes are coming to the game, one of which will completely change the way we play and pick our teams.
Firstly, the usual string of bonus chips – wildcard, free hit, bench boost and triple captain – can now be used twice, once in the first half of the season and then again in the second. That’s a pretty significant adjustment, but not one that fundamentally alters how we build our squads. It just means bigger points swings throughout the season. The assistant manager chip appears to have been left by the wayside.
The second change is far more significant, however. Going forward, players will now earn points for their defensive contributions. Tackles, blocks, interceptions and clearances all count, while midfielders and forwards can also earn points through ball recoveries.
That’s a titanic change to the way we evaluate players and build our squads – and as 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, it’s my job to offer a first take on how this will impact our decisions, which players will benefit, and to explain the new rules.
How do the new Fantasy Premier League defensive contributions work?
Let’s start with the actual rules. Outfield players will now earn two points per match – no more – if they rack up enough defensive contributions in the course of their appearance. Defenders need to complete 10 contributions, while midfielders and forward (who also get to count ball recoveries) need to get up to 12.
When a player gets to the appropriate mark for their position, they will score two additional points. They can’t score one point for getting part of the way there, and nor can they score more than two if they reach double the requisite tally.
It’s also implied in the FPL’s official announcement that there will be more emphasis on defensive actions when working out bonus points as well. We don’t have details of how that will work yet, but it may lead to a slightly more even spread of bonus points, with defenders who have a good game now more likely to pick an extra point or three when they have a good game even if multiple players score goals or pick up assists.
All of which, of course, makes a big difference to how we evaluate defenders and may well make centre-backs and defensive midfielders valuable inclusions in a team. Previously, there was no reason to sign centre-halves unless they scored often or happened to play for a team who kept a high number of clean sheets, and almost nobody ever bought defensive midfielders at all. They were there for the sake of completionism. Until now.
Why the new FPL rules make stars of Everton defenders
Let’s start by assessing how this affects defensive picks – because it makes a major difference to the nature of the players we might pick, and actually favours players who start for lesser teams.
Alongside the announcement, FPL announced the 10 players who would have scored the most points from defensive contributions last season – led by Everton’s James Tarkowski, who would have earned a massive 44 points more having passed the threshold 22 times across the season in just 33 starts.
That would have taken Tarkowski from a modest 105 points up all the way up to 149, good enough for him to have been the eighth best defender in the game – just five points behind Trent Alexander-Arnold and 18 places higher in the standings than he actually was.
Similarly, two players who were fine inclusions for most of the season – Nottingham Forest’s Nikola Milenković and Murillo – would have become the two best defenders in the entire game. Joško Gvardiol would have gone from number one down to fourth.
In short, this change completely shakes up the way we rank defenders, and players we rightly passed over in years gone by are now great picks. Clearly, FPL will adjust players’ prices accordingly, but how can we identify which defenders will benefit the most from the changes and pick out bargains accordingly?
Firstly, it’s worth noting that the days in which full-backs were typically the best picks at any given price point are gone. Take Gvardiol, for instance, a popular pick last year and who picked up five goals – worth 30 points. Tarkowski’s tackles and clearances, worth nothing last year, would have been worth nearly 50% more.
Now, full-backs can pick up defensive contribution points too, of course, but Gvardiol would only have done so twice all season. Partly, that’s because full-backs often spend more time in advanced areas and as such aren’t in any position to effect clearances – and centre-backs always are, so they pick up far more.
But it’s also because Manchester City were good. Even when they were struggling during that long dry spell of form, they tended to control possession and territory, and that meant that their defenders simply didn’t have as many chances to head balls away or slide into tackles.
Everton, by comparison, operate a low block and allow their opponents plenty of time and opportunity to get the ball into the box – and as a result, they tend to rack up massive numbers of clearances. If an Everton defender like Tarkowski and even the most aggressive full-back like Gvardiol are priced evenly, then it’s a coin toss. If there’s still a gap in pricing, even £0.5m, then the Everton centre-half comes out well ahead. We have to jettison years of learned bias.
The same is true of Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth last year, as well as Southampton, but we still want to pick players who earn clean sheets, so Southampton defenders would still have been bad picks, and we need to use our judgement on teams like Forest and Bournemouth as to whether they’ll be as good next season after a summer transfer window in which both teams stand to lose key players.
But the fundamental fact is that defenders who weren’t considerations are now among the best in the game. Jarrad Branthwaite could well be far better than William Saliba even at the same price, for instance – and it will be interesting to see just how much they adjust prices to prepare for the new rules. But this isn’t just a cosmetic change, a few extra bonus points here and there. The best defenders will often now be those who almost never score or set any up.
Are defensive midfielders now a serious option for your squads?
Midfielders need to rack up more contributions to get their points, but that still means that some defensive midfielders will become important players for the first time – and FPL’s announcement highlighted, as an example, the fact that Moisés Caicedo would have picked up an extra 42 points last season. That would have put him just five points behind Kaoru Mitoma.
Now, Mitoma was not the gold standard for attacking midfielders and wingers last season, and even the best defensive midfielders will still score fewer than their goalscoring counterparts – but if players like Caicedo are still cheap, then they could well be efficient enough to become regular inclusions in our teams.
Fundamentally, the best way to build a squad is to start with the players you think will score the absolute most points and then add the players you think will score the most points-per-million to flesh your side out. A £5.0m defensive midfielder could now be a hugely important enabler.
The issue is that the defensive midfielders who chip in with occasional goals and assists anyway – for instance, Declan Rice, Enzo Fernández and Rodri – don’t actually register many defensive contributions, again due to the nature of how much possession their teams get during games, and because they’re almost never the ones making clearances.
When Rice was at West Ham, he would have picked up bucketloads of points, but looking through his match logs for last season with Arsenal, he may not have earned extra points a single time – and nor would Rodri, as far as I can tell, although it’s tricky to be certain because ‘ball recoveries’ aren’t a fully tracked stat with the data companies we use, and FPL may have a generous definition. At most, though, they’d have picked up just a handful of spare points.
So the players where the needle might move are the cheap defensive midfielders with attacking contributions who also score the odd goal – Tomaš Soucek, for instance, would have been a star player in his pomp.
Still, Caicedo could become a budget enabler if he’s still got a low price attached to him and if there is another Soucek out there, they’re worth seeking out. But ultimately, these changes should, at first glance, make far more difference to how we pick defenders than it will to our midfield selections.
Maybe once we have the data on how bonus points are affected and a bit more information on how defensive contributions are calculated, that assumption will prove false, but ultimately I think this is a big deal for defenders but doesn’t make much difference in midfield. Only those players who rack up huge numbers for tackles and interceptions like Caicedo and Elliot Anderson become worthy of serious consideration, and again only if FPL don’t hike their prices up.
For my first drafts this season, I expect my back line to look wildly different but my midfield to look much the same as it would have done before. Rodri isn’t suddenly going to outscore Cole Palmer, and Bukayo Saka isn’t going to take a back seat to Habib Diarra. Probably, anyway…
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