How pricing works in FPL

 

It is a mistake to suppose that the initial pricings in each new FPL season are a reliable measure of a player's value, his likely points return.

For managers new to the game, it serves as a reasonably reliable guide to who the best points-prospects are - but it's not infallible. And it's certainly not finely-tuned, not a precise correlation to likely points return: the most expensive players simply do not provide 'value for money' on a points-per-pound basis; the 'premium' and 'super-premium' players are lifted beyond that consideration and have to be evaluated on other criteria.

It is also a mistake to suppose that it is based only on last season's performance.

It is very largely; but there are important other factors at play. Haaland this year, for example, has had his price increased not because he had a great season last year (it was, by his standards, a pretty mediocre one!), but because Salah has left the league, creating a void at the top end of the pricing scale.

Pricing is, in fact, primarily determined by the need to maintain budget pressure - so players are priced relative to other 'competitor' players in their position category or price bracket, and in an overall context of how many players there are available at each of the price-points.

With the likes of Kane, Son, DeBruyne and Salah leaving the league in recent years, without any comparable replacements coming in, and with almost all the most exciting young talents like Saka and Palmer and Foden and Mitoma having very subdued seasons last year, we are left with a very thin top-end in the pricing spectrum this year. Haaland and Bruno Fernandes are the only two 'super-premiums'; and nobody else is priced at or above 10 million. The next most expensive forward, Alexander Isak, is only 9.0 million this year, while Saka and Palmer are the only 9.5-million-pound players (which many feel is still a bit too high, given their returns last year). Semenyo is the only player at 8.5, and only five players (one of them a defender!!) are priced at 8.0 million this year.

The pricing gnomes have tried to compensate by increasing the prices of a lot of defenders, and creating a lot of congestion in the 6.5-7.5-million range (which is probably where most of the crucial selection decisions will have to be made this year), but.... it really looks like the system is 'broken' at the moment: there isn't any effective pressure on budget - and for the first time in years (perhaps ever??) people might be having quite a stacked bench and/or leaving some cash unspent, even in Gameweek 1.

The shortage of elite points prospects in the game at the moment has meant that last year's three outstanding performers - Haaland, Fernandes, and Gabriel - have been priced stupidly, eye-wateringly high. For me, this has been aggressively overdone: there is a jarring disconnect now between how much they cost and how much 'value' they offer. So, ordinarily, in most years, they would be very clearly 'priced out', and we'd just have to find a way to get by without them. It would, almost certainly, be more advantageous to use the money saved on them to enhance the rest of the squad, because buying them would inevitably leave the rest of the squad very weak. This year, however, I don't think that level of budget pressure is there: it seems it might be perfectly possible to afford all three of them without completely beggaring the rest of the squad; and having at least one of them is not a problem at all. This situation creates some interesting dilemmas of its own - which I'll probably write a bit more on shortly.

Yes, Gabriel, Fernandes, and Haaland are grotesquely overpriced this year; but they're still arguably 'affordable'.