Will Benjamin Šeško be a big player in Fantasy Premier League? Our expert runs the numbers...
Another transfer saga has finally wrapped up and, with it, another new player has been added to the Fantasy Premier League database – and at just £7.5m, Manchester United new boy Benjamin Šeško looks like a pretty tempting prospect.
Šeško has scored 27 league goals over the past two seasons with RB Leipzig, and now gets to play in front of Mathues Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo and Bruno Fernandes. On paper, at least, United’s attack suddenly look rather threatening. But is Šeško better than alternatives at his price point like Dominic Solanke, Chris Wood and Jean-Philippe Mateta? As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, it’s my job to figure that out.
Is Benjamin Šeško going to be a hit in Fantasy Premier League?
Šeško’s production in Germany was consistent over the past two seasons – he would have scored the equivalent of 67 points’ worth of goals and assists in 2024/25, and 62 points in 2023/24.
There were a couple of bookings and a red card in there, and it’s hard to guess the number of bonus points he might have received, but that’s the loose equivalent output to players like Mateta and Jørgen Strand Larsen.
That’s a solid starting point and suggests either that Šeško is fairly priced at £7.5m or that Strand Larsen is a little underpriced, but it isn’t enough to make him look like an immediate must-buy. Players like Yoane Wissa, Jarrod Bowen and Wood would all have outperformed him at a similar price point last season.
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Of course, he’s still only 22 and improving, and will now play with some pretty dangerous players in support. He could easily find himself getting more scoring chances and moving well above the 150 point mark in FPL.
There are arguments that doing so won’t be a straightforward process. United may have added some firepower this summer but they had a long way to go to become a decent team again, and their putrid attack last season wasn’t caused solely by poor individual play but also by a team structure with failed to come together. United failing to sign a new midfielder should be cause for some concern.
Throw in a relatively tricky run of fixtures to start the season and the uncertainty that always surrounds the prospects of players moving to the Premier League for the first time, and you have a recipe for a player who goes on the watch-list rather than in the starting squad.
How does Šeško compare with other £7.5m strikers in the FPL?
In many ways, of course, the real question is how he compares with the other primary options at his price point – particularly Wood, Mateta and Solanke, with Wissa perhaps best excluded until his future is resolved, with the Congolese forward missing training recently while he pushed for a move away from Brentford.
Wood and Mateta both outscored Šeško last season with 20 and 14 goals respectively compared to Šeško’s 13 in the Bundesliga, but on a minute-by-minute basis he was actually scoring fractionally more often than Mateta while creating goals twice as quickly, and according to xG was converting his chances rather more efficiently.
The numbers between Šeško and Mateta are close, meaning that any analysis of which is a better buy probably comes down to personal opinion, form and fixture difficulty. With Šeško perhaps rotating a little as he settles in to start the season, it’s hard to argue that Mateta, who has had a fine pre-season, isn’t a much safer bet.
Wood scored far more often last season, of course, but stats across his long career suggest that his strike rate last year (scoring 20 goals from 13.4xG) is not sustainable and something of a one-off. The New Zealander has never outscored his xG by anything like such a wide margin in the Premier League before, and it’s optimistic to assume he will do so again.
Even the worst reading of his stats suggests that he will score as often as a Mateta or a Šeško if Nottingham Forest’s attack functions this season, but they have scored just one goal in six games in warm-ups (scored by Wood), which is a rather worrying sign. They’ll surely be better than that come the start of the season, but there’s nothing to suggest that Wood will greatly outshine Mateta or Šeško if the Slovenian carries his Bundesliga form into the Premier League.
Solanke, although a pretty popular choice in draft teams, is hard to argue for. He scored the fewest goals of any of our candidates last season, undershot his xG, and his team are starting the season without their two best creative players in the stricken James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski. Šeško may be a gamble, but is probably a safer bet than Solanke unless the Englishman recover his 2023/24 form extremely quickly.
Right now, I think the choice is between Wood or Mateta, depending on your reading of whether Forest’s easy early fixtures outweigh Mateta’s form coming into the new campaign – and it’s tricky to justify having Šeško in from the start. That said, he should be at least close to a par with the FPL’s known quantities at £7.5m, and if United’s new-look attack clicks quickly, he could easily be a fantastic buy.
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