Erling Haaland is set for a record-breaking FPL price - should you have him in your team, sign Bruno Fernandes instead, or try to buy both?
Ahead of the game’s impending launch, the Fantasy Premier League has slowly started drip-feeding price reveals to us – kicking off with the revelation that Manchester City’s Erling Haaland is about to become the most expensive player in FPL history.
That means that the Norwegian will break his own record of £15m and might cause many players to think twice about having him in their team – especially when considered alongside the fact that Bruno Fernandes, another player just about every team would like to have, is also getting a price bump.
So should you sign Haaland, save your budget for Fernandes, or try to squeeze both into your team at a staggeringly high price? Our resident FPL expert is here with his answer to a key question…
How much is Erling Haaland in the FPL – and should you sign him?
Manchester City and Norway star Erling Haaland is set for a record breaking FPL price tagplaceholder image
Manchester City and Norway star Erling Haaland is set for a record breaking FPL price tag | Getty Images
Haaland’s price tag has been set at a massive £15.5m off the back of a 239-point season in which he became the highest-scoring player in the game for the second time. It’s a hell of a lot of money, especially when the gap between him and the chasing pack wasn’t all that high.
239 points was the lowest top score for 11 years and was just four points ahead of Bruno Fernandes – and we now know that the Manchester United midfielder will be worth £12.0m. That’s a hefty fee as well, but it doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that Fernandes has a much better pound-per-point value than Haaland right now.
A lot of players are going to be leave Haaland out in favour of buying Fernandes and another premium midfielder or two – Bukayo Saka, Cole Palmer and so on – in order to be able to fill out their team with Arsenal defenders and the like. After all, if you have both Haaland and Fernandes, you don’t have much room left for star players in the rest of your team.
Spending £27.5m on the two best players from last season would leave you with £72.5m for 13 players, an average of just over £5.5m per player. That’s really not much considering that other premium players will be much more expensive.
Even if you assume that one goalkeeper and two defenders cost you the minimum of £4.0m and you find a striker to ride the bench at £4.5m – minimising the cost of your substitutes to max out on starters is a good strategy at the beginning of the season – you’ll still only have an average budget of £6.2m per player. Having both Haaland and Fernandes will mean that players either need to skip other premium midfielders or defenders from the best teams. There’s a steep cost to having them both in your team.
To help the case for signing Fernandes but not Haaland even further, Manchester United have one of the easiest starts to the season of any team and they kick off with consecutive games against newly-promoted sides. There’s no particular reason to believe that Fernandes will drop off, that his form will suffer, or that he isn’t an essential inclusion in your starting FPL squad.
In short, if you’re going to cut one of them in order to be able to afford players in other positions, it looks a lot like Haaland is the one who will have to make way – but that isn’t necessarily the case at all...
Why Erling Haaland is still a must buy – even at £15.5m
Erling Haaland is likely to be owned by the majority of FPL players again this seasonplaceholder image
Erling Haaland is likely to be owned by the majority of FPL players again this season | Getty Images
I’ll preface my explanation for why Haaland is still likely to be an essential pick for your starting team by noting that it’s impossible to be certain about the ideal composition of an FPL squad without having access to the full price list – but we have years of established pricing patterns to work with, and I would be surprised if this year proved to be sufficiently different to change my mind about Haaland.
The first reason that Haaland may be more important than Fernandes despite the gap in price-per-point value is striker scarcity. There are generally so few good strikers in the game – and even fewer at budget-friendly price points – that having a striker who more or less guarantees goals is like gold dust.
How many forwards look like truly reliable assets heading into the new season? João Pedro could well be good again but massively improved his goal-to-xG ratio last season and that could prove to be a one-off. Alexander Isak and Ollie Watkins are coming off down years. Dominic Solanke has injury concerns, Viktor Gyökeres had a dodgy debut season, and so on and so forth. There are very few forwards who will simply stick six or more points on your scoresheet week after week, and many more midfielders who might just do the job.
It may well be the case that two or three of those strikers hit form this season, their price tags are reasonable enough, and that it’s better to spread the money across the front line instead of signing Haaland. It’s absolutely possible that the best team doesn’t have Haaland in it at all. But in the dark, with so much unknown information, having Haaland in from the start gives you the best odds of a strong start to the campaign.
Which leads into the second key reason that Haaland is probably still essential: It’s much easier to use transfers to trade down from Haaland than it is to trade up into him if you start without him and he proves to be a vital signing. Going from high price players into lower price players gives you more flexibility about how you use your transfers and requires fewer of them up front.
It’s also worth remembering that there will almost certainly be several players, especially in midfield, who end up massively outperforming low price points. There always are – think about players like Elliot Anderson and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall last year, who were cheap but still scored well, and made it possible to build a top-heavy team that was competitive.
Whether a top heavy strategy ends up being the best after a few weeks or not, it’s easier to go from top heavy to a broader spending spread than vice versa – and much harder to find a striker you can truly trust to score the goals you need.
For that reason, my belief is that having Haaland is very likely to be the right move for Gameweek 1, and I’ll be working to build a team which has both him and Fernandes in from the get-go. Both look too good to turn down.