An under-the-radar transfer looks to have unlocked a £5m bargain midfield option on Fantasy Premier League
We’re barely more than a week away from the start of a brand new Fantasy Premier League season – and the transfer market is starting to throw up some interesting moves which may completely change the shape of our draft squads.
No sooner has Martin Dúbravka’s switch to Burnley reshaped thousands upon thousands of FPL teams than another transfer moves the goalposts, this time Everton’s £28m signing of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall. Priced at just £5.0m, the midfielder has gone from a back-up to a likely regular starter, so has he just become one of the best budget enablers in the game?
Why Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall could be an essential FPL asset
We didn’t really get to see what Dewsbury-Hall could do in the top flight last season. He made just two Premier League starts, picked up just one assist, and as such was a complete non-factor in the Fantasy Premier League.
The 26-year-old was spectacular in Leicester City’s 2023/24 Championship season, when he racked up 12 goals and 14 assists and helped the Foxes to secure promotion, but we don’t really have clear data to suggest how he’ll perform at Everton. Still, he’s likely to be a regular starter, can play as a number ten or out wide, and should be at the heart of David Moyes’ attacking plan.
Even though our data is limited, we can still try to extrapolate his likely FPL scoring rate from the numbers we do have – and while he was only occasionally used in the Premier League, Dewsbury-Hall was a regular in cup competitions. That gives us something to work with.
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In total, he scored four goals and provided two assists in 29 appearances, which sounds pretty poor, but he only occasionally played the full 90 minutes - it was the equivalent of scoring one goal every four matches while picking up an assist every eight.
If we said that Dewsbury-Hall played the equivalent of 34 full games in the Premier League, which is a fair guess for most key players in the league, then that would work out to about eight or nine goals and four assists. That’s just about enough to push toward a 140-point season when you factor in clean sheets and some bonus points, with the potential for more if he really flourishes and takes on a role similar to the one he had at Leicester.
For just £5.0m, that’s a pretty impressive potential return. It’s effectively impossible to know whether that estimate is a true average of his likely performance, or somewhere closer to his floor or ceiling, but there is a very real chance that Dewsbury-Hall scores enough to be a strong set-and-forget enabler who frees up the funds to chase the big points elsewhere.
Comparing Dewsbury-Hall with other options
The question, of course, isn’t just whether signing Dewsbury-Hall is a good idea but whether it’s a better idea than some of the alternatives at a similar price point.
We recently took a deep dive into the best budget midfielders coming into the new season – an article which didn’t mention Dewsbury-Hall given his situation at the time – and one of the players we’re interested in who gives us a solid point of comparison is the new Everton man’s former team-mate, Moisés Caicedo, who comes in at £5.5m.
Caicedo earned 98 points last season but with the new defensive contribution system in full effect, he would have picked up 140. That’s probably fairly close to the Ecuadorian’s ceiling, a freakishly good scoring season notwithstanding. In short, Dewsbury-Hall may well be about as good as Caicedo while also being £0.5m cheaper, enabling spending elsewhere. On paper, it looks like Dewsbury-Hall could be a great signing for your FPL team.
There are caveats, of course. Firstly, Dewsbury-Hall is an unknown whereas Caicedo isn’t – the Chelsea man getting to 140 points or nearby is more predictable than it is with Dewsbury-Hall.
Secondly, Everton are not noted for being a fluent attacking side who get large numbers of goals out of their attacking midfielders. Dwight McNeil shows us that it’s absolutely possible, of course, but you would expect a player like Dewsbury-Hall to get more goal contributions playing for a team like Chelsea than you would under David Moyes. That isn’t a dig at Everton, just an acknowledgement of the reality that they are a defensive team first and foremost and don’t tend to score many goals to go around.
In short, Dewsbury-Hall is a risky buy with a very high ceiling. If he does become the focal point of Everton’s attack and scores at his Chelsea or Leicester City rate, he will be a good enabler at a minimum with some chance of being a genuinely great one – but there’s a world in which he struggles, scores four or five goals, and only scrapes over 100 points.
In teams which plan to start with four midfielders most gameweeks, I love Dewsbury-Hall because that’s where you should be aiming to spend as little as possible on one of your midfielders. In teams which set up to have five starting midfielders, signing him feels like taking just slightly more of a chance, especially given that Chelsea have a relatively soft start to the season, which shouldn’t do Caicedo any harm. There is very much a fail case. Even with that in mind, however, Everton’s new signing has suddenly become a serious consideration for every FPL manager.
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