Haaland sets a new benchmark in Fantasy Premier League, priced at an unprecedented £15.5m for 2026/27.

Details - https://www.premierleague.com/en/news/4680490?utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_campaign=fpl-classic&utm_content=haaland_price_reveal

Season 3 of me doing this; seems to be a good way to keep up with the price updates.

Will update as and when (while working hard at home if work is watching).

Position Changes:

Any guesses?

Kroupi?

Declan?

Szobo?

Don't think any of them warrant it and if they do, possibly will create a dead asset. Kroupi only makes sense if he stays.

The consensus best two assets after the robot striker Haaland himself is Bruno and Gabriel. However, which of these two options is less essential?

Bruno Fernandes

Underwhelming World Cup but he is the record assist man of the Premier League and captain of Man United. On pens and corners, he was the undisputed 2nd best asset last season. Only concern is, will his form drop off??

Gabriel

The best defender and a defcon machine. He even tricked half the FPL playerbase including myself into triple captaining a defender. With his CB partner Saliba out injured, will the Arsenal defence continue to dominate the league?

I re-calculated every FPL bonus point from 2025/26 under the new 2026/27 BPS rules.

All 380 fixtures re-scored; the bonus re-ranked in each.

The 4 changes: CBI now 1 per 3 (was per 2), 'being tackled' -1 removed, pen save 8 to 7, +1 per big-chance save.

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First, the overall picture. Net season bonus change by position, across all 537 players:

MID +53, FWD +15, GK +1, DEF -77.

Of 183 defenders, 91 change (68 of them down). Removing the tackle penalty and cutting the CBI reward both push bonus from defenders to midfielders.

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The 10 biggest gainers, mostly attacking mids and forwards, plus a keeper:

Kudus +5, Gakpo +5, Bowen +4, Kroupi +4, Cunha +4, Sarr +4, Isidor +4, Verbruggen +4, Lewis-Potter +4, Hugo Bueno +4.

Mostly the removed 'being tackled' penalty; Verbruggen from the new big-chance bonus.

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The 10 biggest losers, almost all defenders:

Gabriel -7, Konaté -5, Tarkowski -5, Casemiro -5, Bijol -4, Thiaw -4, Heaven -3, De Ligt -3, Cucurella -3, Vicario -3.

Two reasons: CBI drops to 1 per 3 (was per 2), and attackers who shed the tackle penalty now outrank them.

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'DEF -77' hides two opposite stories.

Full-backs & wing-backs: net +11. They dribble and get tackled, so losing the -1 penalty helps, and their low CBI means the reward cut barely lands.

Centre-backs: net -88. The CBI cut is aimed right at them.

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Most affected player: Gabriel (Arsenal), 30 bonus down to 23.

His bonus falls in 8 fixtures. Two forces combine: the CBI cut trims his own BPS every time (by 1-2), and attackers who shed the tackle penalty climb past him, dropping him out of the top 3.

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At the very top, almost nothing moves. Haaland stays on 43.

His bonus is nearly all from goals (18 BPS each), not defensive stats, so the changes do not reach his total. His rank still shifts in 4 fixtures, but they cancel out (-2, +1, +2, -1).

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All 537 players, searchable. Every fixture-by-fixture change and who inherited each point:

https://fpl.red/bonus

Data: FPL for the baseline bonus and penalty save, Opta (FotMob) for tackled + big-chance saves.

Conclusion

The 2026/27 BPS changes are a rebalancing, not a nerf. The rules mostly move bonuses around rather than remove them: roughly +69 to midfielders, forwards and full-backs, -77 from center-backs.

On the goalkeeper data: FPL's "+1 per big chance saved" uses Opta's big-chance tag, and I don't have access to it. (FotMob has shot xG but not the tag; FBref uses StatsBomb). So I reconstructed it: the top keepers are pinned to their published big-chance-saved totals, and the rest are flagged from shot xG using a cutoff calibrated to those totals.

I used to chase fixtures blindly, but lately I lean slightly more towards underlying stats and current form. Which factor usually carries more weight for you?

With Haaland revealed at a record £15.5m today, I want to make an argument I've been sitting on for a while: the weird, spread-out pricing at the top of the game is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that the scoring system is too simple.

The pattern

Look at the top of the price list the last two seasons:

- 25/26: Salah £14.5m, Haaland £14.0m... then nothing until Palmer at £10.5m. A £3.5m dead zone. And neither Palmer or Saka justified their price at around £10.0m.

- 26/27: Haaland £15.5m, Bruno expected around £12.0m as the second-most expensive player. Another ~£3.5m gap with probably nobody in between and I do not see Palmer or Saka being worth the £10.0-11.0m price tag they will most likely get either.

Why does this keep happening?

Because in a system where points come almost entirely from goals, assists and clean sheets, there are only ever 2-3 players who are genuinely elite at producing those, and everyone else is miles behind. FPL prices reflect expected points, and expected points are brutally top-heavy when there are so few ways to score them. So the best players get priced at £14-15.5m to "balance" them, and the game becomes a solved puzzle: pick the most expensive, fill the rest with £4.5m-£6.5m enablers, and the mid-price bracket is a wasteland/casino.

Balancing by price is the lazy fix

Making the best player unaffordable-adjacent doesn't create interesting decisions. It creates one decision (Haaland: yes or no) and then forces everyone into the same budget structure around it. Template city.

The better fix is to balance from the other direction: give more players more routes to points, so the gap between "elite" and "good" shrinks on the points side instead of being taxed on the price side.

We literally just watched this work

Defensive contributions last season are the proof of concept. Overnight, a whole class of players who were previously fodder — ball-winning CBs, defensive mids — became genuinely viable picks. Defenders went from "find cheapest route to a clean sheet" to players with an actual points floor of their own. The viable player pool expanded massively, and team diversity in that price bracket went up with it. Nobody's price had to be nerfed or inflated to make that happen. They just added a new route to points and the game got deeper.

Now apply that same logic to attackers who aren't Haaland. For example:

- 1 pt per 3 successful dribbles (per match, like save points)

- 1 pt per 2 key passes (per match)

- 1 pt per 2 shots on target (per match)

- 1 pt for goals scored from outside the box — a screamer shouldn't be worth the same as a tap-in

I ran the numbers on last season's match logs for some of the more popular players

Here's what 25/26 would have looked like with the first three rules added (real per-match Opta data, actual FPL totals as the baseline), sorted by who benefits most:

Look at who's at the top and who's at the bottom of that list:

- The biggest winners are the players football considers brilliant but FPL considers useless. Doku (+38%) jumps from 120 to 166 at £6.5m — from fun punt to genuine pick — purely for things he already visibly does every match. Wirtz, Szoboszlai, Enzo: all the "great player, meh FPL asset" types suddenly have a floor.

- Bruno created 137 chances last season — almost 4 per game — and current scoring gives him zero direct points for any of it. With a key pass route he overtakes Haaland, 303 to 266. The game is about to price him #2, so FPL clearly knows he's that good; the scoring just has no way to express it except through penalties and assists that depend on teammates finishing. He just had such a brilliant season.

- Haaland is near the bottom at +11%. He still gains +27 — but from dribbles and key passes, the routes everyone else feeds on, he gains just +7. He's still clearly the best player. He's just no longer playing a different sport.

- The £6.0-6.5m bracket becomes a real decision. Rice, Szoboszlai, Enzo and Thiago all land on 188-207 — legitimately premium totals from budget starting prices.

- And crucially, the rules don't hand out charity. Palmer (+13%) and Gyökeres (+8%, dead last) had poor seasons and gain almost nothing, because they didn't create, didn't dribble, didn't shoot. The floors reward doing things on the pitch, not reputation or price tag.

(I also checked the outside-the-box goal bonus: Haaland scored 26 of his 27 goals inside the box and Thiago all 22, while Szoboszlai scored 4 of his 6 from range. Tiny numbers league-wide — it's a flavour rule, not a floor — but it points the same direction: every added route rewards someone other than the tap-in machine.)

The Haaland-to-Saka gap shrinks from 52% to 33%, and instead of one premium and a wasteland you get a whole band of players between 165 and 300 points. Prices can compress naturally because the points already have.

"But that's point inflation / everyone will just score more"

DC already answered this — floors went up, ceilings stayed put, and the game got more varied, not less, because there were more legitimate ways to build a team. And the thresholds are a dial, not the argument: at 1 pt per 3 key passes instead of 2, Bruno gains +34, Szoboszlai +16, Saka/Wirtz/Doku/Rice/Enzo +11-12, Haaland +2 — smaller numbers, same compression.

A note on the shots rule: it's the striker route — its big winners are Haaland (+20) and £6.0m Thiago (+15), the two highest-volume shooters. That's by design, the same way key passes are the creator route and dribbles the winger route: each archetype gets a floor for its actual job, exactly like DC gave defenders theirs. If Haaland's +20 bothers you, the tunable version is counting only saved shots on target — his gain drops to roughly +8 and the rule purely compensates attackers running into hot keepers. (Raising the threshold to 3 SoT doesn't work, by the way — nobody else clusters 3 in a match, so Saka drops to zero while Haaland keeps +10.)

FPL clearly isn't afraid to touch the scoring system anymore. I'd rather they keep going down that road than keep stretching the price ladder until Haaland costs £17m.

What routes to points would you add?

Hi, I tend to over-obsess over certain subjects, and football fantasy is one of them. I'm currently in the process of making a FPL player shortlist and was wondering what some very weird and obscure players you are looking at for your draft leagues or even classic leagues are.

For me, some are the likes of Milan van Ewijk and Ouattara cause every Brentford right winger has a breakout season.

Details : https://www.premierleague.com/en/news/4679886?utm_source=x&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_campaign=fpl-classic&utm_content=fpl_position_changes

There has been a lot of discussion (and confusion) about FPL’s price predictions; here's a quick explainer of what they are, and what they're not.

Exact Price Change Progress percentages

The biggest improvement over external price-change tools is that the Price Change Progress percentage is accurate. If Rice is shown at 96%, that is his actual progress towards the price-change threshold, rather than an algorithmic estimate.

Tools like LiveFPL have spent years honing their algorithms to approximate the thresholds, including all the rules and nuances connected to ownership, previous rises/falls, etc.

FPL knows the threshold and exactly how close each player is to reaching it. This is information we never truly had before. If a player is past 100% progress, that means that player will rise (they use -100% for falls) if no further transfers are made before the price change deadline.

Estimated Price Change Prediction percentages

The part that may cause confusion is the Price Predictions.

FPL are not saying:

"We don't have a clue what the price rise/fall thresholds are; here's our guess."

FPL are saying:

"We know the thresholds, but we don't know how many transfers will be made before the next price change."

For example, “Very Likely to Rise” means that, based on the current rate of transfers, the player is on track to pass the 100% threshold before the next price update.

That status is still a prediction because transfer trends can change. If sales per hour increase, or purchases per hour decrease, the player may no longer reach the threshold in time.

In short, there are two separate pieces of information:

• Progress: The player’s actual progress towards the price-change threshold.
• Prediction: Whether current transfer trends are expected to carry the player past that threshold before the next update.

The closer it gets to the price-change deadline, the more reliable the prediction should become.

As a stats nerd, there are a load of other questions I've got...

• Are FPL going to use a simple transfers-per-hour approach for predictions? This is likely the most sensible, but doesn't account for inevitable manager behaviour when both the Progress percentage and Prediction percentage pass 100%, nor does it account for the supply of players who can actually make a given transfer using FTs.
• Is the Progress percentage "truncated" (towards 0) or "rounded" - because if it's rounded, a "100%" player may not actually rise (e.g., 99.5% rounds to 100%).

But regardless, this is what I understand of the system at present, from their short reveal video and article - plus years of using LiveFPL.

Hope this helps!

I got some friends(8 of us) together and this is everyone’s first time what are optimal league settings? Also is there a date that leagues are able to be created?

Rather then get fixated on whether wingers should count as midfielders or not, wouldn't it be better if both categories just got the same amount of points for goals?

As is midfielders get cs points and are more likely to reach defcon, so why should they also get an extra point for scoring?

maybe even there could be a subcategory in midfielders where you're either a central or wide midfielder, and wide midfielders don't get the extra goal point but central ones do, as typically wingers and strikers score the most goals, I don't think anyone has ever won the golden boot playing as a 10, or at least it barely happens now that we've moved away from 442 formations

Everyone(including myself) will have him in my team anyways but just so you know.

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