Our resident expert runs through his list of players to avoid in the Fantasy Premier League this season.
Every year, there are a few Fantasy Premier League players who get put on a fast-moving hype train before the season starts, with a huge number of managers persuaded to put players in their teams that probably just shouldn’t be there. Every year, millions of managers fall through the same trapdoors.
As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, it’s my job to identify the players who are either too high-risk or simply too bad to be worth a place in your team to start the season – and I’ve picked out five players that I’ll be swerving for my opening squad below, giving my reasons for each piece of avoidance that I’m doing.
I could well be proven wrong, of course, but in my view, these are this year’s Christopher Nkunkus and Valentín Barcos. Sign them at your own risk. And if you find this article helpful, you can also check out my opinions on the best budget enablers at each of the positions through these links: Goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards.
João Pedro – Chelsea (£7.5m)
The Brazilian’s impressive form at the Club World Cup and relatively cheap price point has put him at the top of plenty of managers’ lists, and if he does indeed play 30 or more games as Chelsea’s starting striker then he’s probably worth every penny. But with Liam Delap on the books and every chance that he’s rotated and often played in deeper or wider positions, João Pedro is simply not a safe bet.
That’s before you factor in the fact that although he scored 10 league goals for Brighton & Hove Albion last year, five of them came from the penalty spot – and with Cole Palmer in the side, it’s unlikely that João Pedro is on spot-kick duties very often. Even as a regular starter and indeed star of the Brighton side last season, he only managed a modest 126 points in total.
The omens and stats suggest that João Pedro will be average as a starting forward, and probably overpriced, especially when he’s unlikely to play 90 minutes every week. More likely to be an Nkunku than a Palmer.
Alex Iwobi – Fulham (£6.5m)
The Fulham winger was one of last season’s surprise packages in FPL terms, racking up 156 points at a very budget-friendly price point and consistently overperforming expectations – but it stretches credulity to believe that he’ll be quite as effective again, and the price bump he’s understandably received makes me very wary indeed.
That isn’t intended as a slight against Iwobi or his team, but rather a cold reading of the data behind his output. Iwobi scored nine goals last season from an xG of 4.7 having never outscored his expected rate before, and there is nothing in the stats to suggest that he’s particularly likely to do it again. In short, 2024/25 was probably an outlier that Iwobi will struggle to replicate, and it doesn’t help matters that Fulham have a pretty hideous run of fixtures to start the season. With so many other midfielders likely to outshine him at £6.5m and the fixture difficulty well in the red, I’m steering clear.
William Saliba & Gabriel Magalhães – Arsenal (£6.0m)
A two-for-one here. Saliba and Gabriel were understandably popular choices last season given Arsenal’s excellent defensive record, and retain their lofty price tags this time around despite their relative underperformance in FPL terms. The problem is that everything has changed when it comes to selecting centre-backs, and these guys are among the players that lose out badly.
Because Arsenal enjoy plenty of possession and don’t spend all that much time with their backs to the wall, neither Gabriel nor Saliba rack up large numbers of defensive contributions and with the way the new rules work, it’s overwhelmingly likely that many cheaper defenders (think James Tarkowski, Marc Guéhi and others) outscore the Gunners’ defensive duo. As good as they may be in real life, they’re likely to be badly overpriced from an FPL standpoint this season.
An easy swerve from my point of view, as you’ll almost certainly get more production for less money in many places. I wouldn’t be shocked if a dozen or more centre-backs outscore them this year, in many cases quite comfortably. While we’re on the subject of Arsenal, it’s worth noting that while some defensive midfielders will benefit greatly from the new defensive points rules, Declan Rice probably won’t be one of them.
Maxim de Cuyper – Brighton & Hove Albion (£4.5m)
Are we really doing this again? Many of us fell into the Barco trap a year ago when it looked as though the talented Argentine left-back might get a quick path to first-team football, and now a combination of summer signing De Cuyper’s promising performances in Belgium and the sale of Pervis Estupiñán is getting another hype train rolling out of the station.
De Cuyper will no doubt have a chance to make the left-back position his own but Fabian Hürzeler has alternatives and last season preferred to play regular starters out of position when required rather than bring in a clear-cut back-up. If De Cuyper doesn’t nail the berth down early, he won’t get many minutes in the immediate future – and his production at Club Brugge was decent rather than towering.
He managed two goals and six assists last season, and his defensive contribution numbers weren’t adding up to points. The ceiling seems too low for the risk of a rapid price drop, especially given that Brighton’s defence wasn’t great last year.
Bryan Mbeumo & Matheus Cunha – Manchester United (£8.0m)
Now, I’m coming into this one by saying that I reckon there is a pretty great chance that both of these players end up in my team at some stage. They’re proven goalscorers who pick up plenty of points. They’re very generously priced given their track record. They could be the two best mid-price midfielders in the game, especially given that Cunha is likely to start up front. There’s just one problem – they play for Manchester United.
That isn’t meant to be a flippant dig at a struggling team, but an honest assessment of the fact that they were awful last year and until we see something resembling an uptick in front of goal as a whole, I suspect there will be many more points elsewhere. Maybe Cunha and Mbeumo give United the firepower they’ve been missing, but I’ll wait and see, especially given that their first five fixtures include Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City. If these two are finding form and getting the starts after that run, they’re in, but I don’t like my odds of getting big returns for the first month or so.
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