The 2025/26 Season in Numbers
Eight months. 38 gameweeks. Roughly 700 players who took the pitch. Here's what the data says about how it actually went.
2025/26 was a season where the table mostly behaved itself at the top. Haaland scored the most points. Bruno Fernandes had a brilliant year. Arsenal produced both the best defender and the best goalkeeper, neither of which surprised anyone. The interesting part of the season sat one layer below, where the new defensive contribution rule changed what a starting defender was actually worth, where the midfield bracket was unusually deep in the £6.5 to £8m range, and where the season's best differential never crossed 10% ownership.
These pages cover both the headlines and the layer underneath. Five breakdowns sit below, each one answering a different question about how the season actually played out. Team of the Season covers the eleven highest-scoring players regardless of price, with the position leaderboards underneath going down to fifteenth, which is often where the more useful 2026/27 takes actually live. Best Value reframes the same question by what each point cost. Best Differentials handles the under-10% names that paid off anyway. Defensive Contribution unpacks the rule change in real depth. Risers and Fallers compares 2025/26 against 2024/25 head-to-head for the players who showed up in both seasons.
Every list on these pages is filtered to players who ended 2025/26 on a Premier League squad, because the point of the recap isn't nostalgia. It's to help shape the squad you'll actually build when 2026/27 launches.
The eleven highest-scoring players
The eleven players who scored the most FPL points in 2025/26, regardless of position constraint or budget. Read this as the season's heat map, not a buildable squad. Once you put £100m back on the picture, the structure changes quickly.
Five numbers worth knowing
The points total tells you who carried teams through. The xG flag on Haaland is the kind of detail worth remembering, because finishing that far above expected goals is the part of a season that almost never repeats cleanly. The clean sheet leader and the CBIT leader are quietly the two most actionable numbers on the card, and the reason is the same. Defenders are now valued on two streams instead of one, and these two players led both.
Five breakdowns
What this tells us about 2026/27
The clearest takeaway from 2025/26 is that the defensive contribution rule was not a gimmick. It changed defender value in a way the market still hasn't fully priced. The Defensive Contribution leaderboard functions almost as an early scouting list for next year's defender bracket, and several of the names on it are still sitting at prices that look like they predate the rule entirely.
The second pattern is more familiar. Mid-price midfielders again gave the best efficiency per pound spent, and the Best Value page shows the bracket-by-bracket split in some detail. Managers who held one premium midfielder and spent the saved money on £6.5 to £7.5m options out-performed the all-premium approach by a real margin. There is nothing in the data that suggests 2026/27 will look different. If anything, price inflation will make the pattern more pronounced.
The third pattern is the one to be careful with. The top differentials of 2025/26 did not stay differentials. Several of them are now sitting comfortably inside the top thirty by ownership, which is exactly how the category works. A differential is by definition a market inefficiency, and the market closes the gap. The names worth picking next season won't be the names on the Best Differentials page. They'll be the next set of players the market hasn't quite noticed yet, and the page is a guide for where to look, not a list of what to buy.
A final structural note. The Risers list is heavily clustered by club, which usually points to a system change paying off across multiple players. The Fallers list is heavily clustered by lost minutes, which points to availability problems more than form ones. The actionable read is to weight new managers and tactical shifts more heavily than individual form when projecting 2026/27. The clubs that swapped a manager between seasons, or rebuilt around a new spine, are the ones to watch most closely when the new prices land.