Does Mohamed Salah’s penalty miss make him a liability in the FPL? Our expert assesses the fallout from the Community Shield.
The Community Shield gave us our first look at the shape of two Premier League teams as they head into the new season – and gives Fantasy Premier League players some fresh data points to work with as they pick their teams. But how much should we read into events at Wembley, and should we really move away from Mohamed Salah?
Salah’s second penalty miss of the past week has set nerves jangling across the FPL world, with a lot of players who were preparing to pay £14.5m to have last season’s top scoring player in their squad now worried that his dodgy form will creep into the new campaign.
Would getting rid of Salah represent a knee-jerk reaction, however? Should we trust his long-term form or seriously worry about pre-season performances? As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, it’s my job to work it all out…
Why Mohamed Salah should still be in your FPL team despite his penalty miss
Salah blazed the first penalty of Sunday’s shootout against Crystal Palace over the bar – a bad miss which occurred less than a week after he skied one from 12 yards against Athletic Club in a warm-up match. His penalty-taking radar seems to be on the fritz.
That is a legitimate concern. Salah’s record-breaking 344 point haul from last season was partly propped up by nine penalties, all scored. If he keeps missing from the spot then not only will he likely pick up some negative scores, he may also lose penalty duties altogether.
Two of Liverpool’s new signings, Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike, finished last season as their respective team’s primary penalty takers, although Ekitike was behind Omar Marmoush before he left. They could both be candidates to take Salah’s spot-kicks away should he continue to balloon them over the bar.
But Salah will surely still be taking them to start the season and even if you take all of his penalties from the 2024/25 season away, he still would have finished the year with 20 goals, 18 assists, and the highest score of any FPL player by a smaller but still considerable distance.
Since moving to Anfield eight years ago, Salah’s worst performance has been a combined total of 27 goals and assists. His form has ebbed and flowed, as it will with every player, but his floor has always been higher than most players’ ceilings in FPL terms.
He is now 33 and will inevitably fall away at some stage, but he is coming off his most productive season ever and we live in an age in which top players tend to have longer careers than they once did. In the light of the longevity of players like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Luka Modrić, it seems foolish to write off Salah before age has been proven to have caught up with him.
Salah’s consistently huge scores suggest that he will, in all likelihood, outscore players like Erling Haaland and Cole Palmer once again, and an iffy pre-season shouldn’t make anyone doubt the Egyptian just yet. The level has been too high for too long for a couple of penalty misses to be a major concern – he has, after all, missed them before, and did score the opener against Athletic Club. Taking him out of your team based on a penalty shootout would be a major overreaction and I still believe that he’s the right player to have in your starting side.
Liverpool’s dodgy defence and Jean-Philippe Mateta’s form
None of which means that there aren’t some useful takeaways from Sunday’s Community Shield – and the match did make me less interested in Liverpool’s more expensive defenders.
I suspect that his defensive contributions will make Virgil van Dijk a fine defensive asset over the course of the season, even if £6.0m is a little steep, while Jeremie Frimpong’s production with Bayer Leverkusen suggests that he could put the kind of numbers that Trent Alexander-Arnold did at his best. Still, neither is likely to be in my starting team.
Clean sheet points are important and the communication and positioning of Liverpool’s new look-defence (which is likely to look even fresher with the addition of another centre-half at some stage) was wonky, while their fixture difficulty is pretty high for the first few games of the season.
I have high expectations for Frimpong, in particular, but I suspect that he’s a poor investment for the very start of the season – and a somewhat fortuitous goal doesn’t change that assessment. I expect to pick him up at some point, once I have a clearer picture of where I can afford to economise further upfield.
Another player involved whose pre-season form has caught my eye is Crystal Palace striker Jean-Philippe Mateta. His penalty in normal time means he’s scored five goals in four pre-season game, the same as João Pedro, who is generating far more hype despite a weaker long-term track record.
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Mateta is an incredibly reliable goalscorer on impeccable form, and while I usually don’t factor pre-season form into my thinking too much as it’s often a red herring, it’s hard to ignore a proven striker when he’s scoring a lot of goals.
Palace also have a respectable level of fixture difficulty past an opening-day visit to Stamford Bridge, and Mateta might just overtake Chris Wood to make my starting side. Nottingham Forest have easier fixtures but scored just one goal in six pre-season friendlies. Wood, at least, was the one who scored it, but that does make me worry a bit about their attack as a whole.
Pre-season form isn’t entirely meaningless, but it’s all too common for players to snap back to their usual level when playing matches that count for something – but when a good FPL asset has a good pre-season, it’s a promising sign. I’m not counting out Wood, but am increasingly keen on Mateta.
The only strike I have against Palace as a whole is that they’re often slow starters, haven’t made any major signings all summer and are liable to lose Eberechi Eze and Marc Guéhi – quite likely to Liverpool – before too long. That could leave them struggling as a team, even if Mateta is at his best, but he does seem to be heading into the new season on his own finest form. That makes him a very strong consideration for Gameweek 1, but if he’s in my side, it will be alongside Salah.
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