r/FantasyPL • u/patricksquare • 6h ago
The huge price gaps at the top aren't a pricing problem — they're a scoring problem
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:
| Player | 25/26 price | Real FPL points | + dribbles | + key passes | + SoT | New total | Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Doku | £6.5m | 120 | +18 | +24 | +4 | 166 | +38% |
| Bruno | £9.0m | 235 | +1 | +61 | +6 | 303 | +29% |
| Saka | £10.0m | 157 | +11 | +25 | +7 | 200 | +27% |
| Wirtz | £8.5m | 125 | +5 | +22 | +2 | 154 | +23% |
| Szboszlai | £6.5m | 160 | +1 | +31 | +3 | 195 | +22% |
| Enzo | £6.5m | 157 | 0 | +25 | +6 | 188 | +20% |
| Ekitike | £8.5m | 125 | +7 | +5 | +6 | 143 | +14% |
| Palmer | £10.5m | 114 | 0 | +8 | +7 | 129 | +13% |
| Rice | £6.5m | 184 | 0 | +22 | +1 | 207 | +13% |
| Thiago | £6.0m | 181 | +2 | +4 | +15 | 202 | +12% |
| H. Wilson | £5.5m | 168 | +1 | +12 | +6 | 187 | +11% |
| Haaland | £14.0m | 239 | +1 | +6 | +20 | 266 | +11% |
| KDH | £5.0m | 151 | +1 | +12 | +3 | 167 | +11% |
| Gyokeres | £9.0m | 128 | 0 | +3 | +7 | 138 | +8% |
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?
