Which players should you sign and sell in the FPL? Our resident expert looks at the players trending in each direction.
The Fantasy Premier League season is finally starting to get into a rhythm (just in time for an international break, of course) and the data we have on which assets are worth signing or selling is starting to get a bit more reliable – so I’m back with our latest FPL Stock Report to look at the players who are trending up and down ahead of Gameweek 5.
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This isn’t about players whose prices and ownership are changing, but what the data is telling us about different players’ performances and who should be signed and sold this weekend as a result.
I’ll also factor in the impact of short-term fixture difficulty. For instance, while Pascal Groß is on fine form and is putting pre-season concerns about his minutes to bed, is it really the right time to invest when his next five games include Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool? Probably not, so he won’t appear on the Stock Report even though the trends suggest that he’s a great long-term asset. Anyway, with the admin out of the way, let’s dive in…
Arsenal & Chelsea players on the rise in the FPL
Morgan Rogers has at least one goal involvement in every Premier League match so farplaceholder image
Morgan Rogers has at least one goal involvement in every Premier League match so far | Getty Images
Ezri Konsa: We’ve highlighted Konsa as a buy in the past, but thanks to some panicked early trading his price actually fell to £4.4m for a minute before bouncing back. All evidence now suggests that he’s a £4.5m defender who will start regularly for the best defence in the league – and their upcoming fixtures are largely positive. Buy now, because his price is starting to trend up at speed and he won’t stay so cheap for long.
Morgan Rogers: There are some good statistical reasons to believe that Rogers won’t be able to keep his goalscoring exploits up (his three Premier League goals so far have come from 1.38xG and there’s no chance he can sustain that scoring rate) but he’s still looking like great value at £7.7m given how threatening Chelsea’s attack has been so far.
Rogers is a much better buy, in my books, than Cole Palmer. Palmer represents far worse value than Rogers – especially now that his price has already soared up to £9.7m. He has a slightly lower expected and actual goals record than his team-mate, has generated a lower xA, and played fewer key passes.
Palmer is the second best Chelsea midfielder on form, but costs £2.0m more – and Bukayo Saka, who remains cheaper, is scoring slightly more quickly and reliably. I won’t say that Palmer is a bad buy, per se, as his ceiling is high, but he hasn’t been on good enough form to merit his price tag. Rogers is a buy. Palmer is a hold, but not a buy.
Thierno Barry: Now, here’s a recommendation that’s absolutely loaded with caveats. Barry is almost the opposite of a proven goalscorer – he has routinely underperformed his xG, is doing so again, and is on an Everton team who don’t create a ton of chances. But there is a good chance that he’s about to become a great short to medium-term investment.
That’s because he’s a nailed-on £5.5m striker (literally the only one in Everton’s squad) whose next half-dozen games put him up against some pretty flaky defences, and while he does undershoot his xG, he doesn’t tend to do so by so much that he isn’t likely to rebound from one goal from 2.98xG in four matches. That’s a very healthy volume of chance creation for him specifically, even if not from his team as a whole, and a few goals in the coming month or two seems like a pretty safe bet. I’m not going miles out of my way to sign Barry, but if I need an affordable forward to make other deals work, then I like the chances of a good return on investment.
Man Utd, Man City & Liverpool players trending down in the FPL
Bruno Fernandes scored 23 points on Gameweek 2 - but has otherwise been poorplaceholder image
Bruno Fernandes scored 23 points on Gameweek 2 - but has otherwise been poor | Getty Images
Bruno Fernandes: Now, I’ll start this by making a statement which should be obvious – don’t sell Fernandes ahead of a game against Fulham, who have the third highest xG against in the league even after they kept a clean sheet at Anfield. But we do need to start thinking about sell Fernandes if he blanks again.
There was always a risk that he would regress given that his 20 assists last season heavily overshot his xA, and it’s not necessarily a massive shock that Manchester United’s form as a team has declined – but three blanks in four weeks is a problem for a player who costs £12.0m and eats up such a huge percentage of our team values. After the Fulham game, United’s fixture difficulty starts to get a bit patchier. I’m holding for one more week to be safe, but bailing is starting to look like a smart idea.
Antoine Semenyo: I had Semenyo down as a must-buy before the season, even at £8.5m, but he’s now a pretty clear sell. It’s not that he hasn’t scored yet so much as the fact that he’s only racked up 0.18xG in total. There are centre-backs who have rather more than that. Why this should be the case isn’t clear – it might just be natural variance – but Semenyo to Rogers seems to be an easy move to free up some cash right now.
Dominik Szoboszlai: Over a third of FPL players still have the Hungarian in their team, and more of them should think about selling – Szoboszlai has scored a couple of goals in non-Premier League games, which is promising, but his top-flight average right now is just 0.32xG and 0.19xA, neither of which are good enough at £7.0m. He’ll score the odd goal here and there, but you want consistent scoring production at a semi-premium price point, and last season’s 160 point total looks like his absolute ceiling. You can almost certainly do better.