Best Value Picks of 2025/26
Points per million. The cheap players who let managers afford the names everyone else couldn't.
Value in Fantasy isn't really about being cheap. It's about what the cheap player lets you afford somewhere else on the pitch. Every points-per-million leader on this page enabled the manager who owned them to spend the saved budget on a premium they otherwise couldn't have fit, and the best of them turned modest bench upgrades into full-XI improvements over the course of the season.
The leaderboards below are filtered to players who hit at least 900 minutes, which removes the small-sample flukes that distort short PPM tables. Within each position, players are ranked by starting-price PPM, because starting price matters more here than end-of-season price. The value was extracted by the managers who got in before the market caught up, and a lot of these prices climbed sharply by the end of the year.
The season's headline number was Anderson at 32.7 points per million, which is the kind of return that's hard to plan for in pre-season and easy to ride once it starts.
The best-value XI
Top PPM at each position, 3-4-3 shape, 900-minute floor. Not a buildable squad. Read it as the season's per-pound MVPs lined up to show what the market mispriced, position by position.
Top 10 by points-per-million
Goalkeepers
| # | Player | Club | Start £ | End £ | Pts | Pts/£m | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kelleher | Brentford | £4.5m | £4.8m | 143 | 31.8 | 56 |
| 2 | Roefs | Sunderland | £4.5m | £4.8m | 136 | 30.2 | 45 |
| 3 | Raya | Arsenal | £5.5m | £6.2m | 162 | 29.5 | 81 |
| 4 | Verbruggen | Brighton | £4.5m | £4.6m | 130 | 28.9 | 82 |
| 5 | Petrović | Bournemouth | £4.5m | £4.6m | 124 | 27.6 | 66 |
| 6 | Henderson | Crystal Palace | £5.0m | £5.1m | 131 | 26.2 | 58 |
| 7 | Donnarumma | Man City | £5.5m | £5.6m | 135 | 24.5 | 66 |
| 8 | Pickford | Everton | £5.5m | £5.6m | 135 | 24.5 | 62 |
| 9 | Leno | Fulham | £5.0m | £5.0m | 122 | 24.4 | 57 |
| 10 | Martinez | Aston Villa | £5.0m | £5.0m | 120 | 24.0 | 34 |
The cheap end of the bracket ran this leaderboard. Seven of the top ten goalkeepers started at £5.0m or under, and the gap between the top of the value chart and the middle was tight enough that the difference between picking Kelleher and picking Verbruggen came down to one fixture run. Managers who waited for prices to settle paid extra for the same production.
Defenders
| # | Player | Club | Start £ | End £ | Pts | Pts/£m | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Guéhi | Man City | £4.5m | £5.1m | 179 | 39.8 | 65 |
| 2 | Senesi | Bournemouth | £4.5m | £5.2m | 175 | 38.9 | 54 |
| 3 | Mukiele | Sunderland | £4.0m | £4.6m | 151 | 37.8 | 37 |
| 4 | Truffert | Bournemouth | £4.5m | £4.8m | 165 | 36.7 | 70 |
| 5 | Gabriel | Arsenal | £6.0m | £7.3m | 209 | 34.8 | 88 |
| 6 | Van Hecke | Brighton | £4.5m | £4.7m | 148 | 32.9 | 84 |
| 7 | O'Reilly | Man City | £5.0m | £5.3m | 160 | 32.0 | 53 |
| 8 | Alderete | Sunderland | £4.0m | £4.1m | 125 | 31.3 | 10 |
| 9 | Tarkowski | Everton | £5.5m | £5.8m | 170 | 30.9 | 66 |
| 10 | Lacroix | Crystal Palace | £5.0m | £5.2m | 154 | 30.8 | 25 |
Eight of the top ten value defenders started at £5.0m or under, and two of them, Mukiele and Alderete, started at £4.0m. Both finished well clear of half the £5.5m bracket. The CBIT rule is the biggest reason this leaderboard skews so cheap. Defenders who used to be pure clean-sheet bets are now hitting a second points stream, and the market hasn't fully priced what that means for the bottom of the bracket.
Midfielders
| # | Player | Club | Start £ | End £ | Pts | Pts/£m | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anderson | Nott'm Forest | £5.5m | £5.7m | 180 | 32.7 | 53 |
| 2 | Garner | Everton | £5.0m | £5.2m | 159 | 31.8 | 46 |
| 3 | Wilson | Fulham | £5.5m | £5.8m | 168 | 30.5 | 32 |
| 4 | Dewsbury-Hall | Everton | £5.0m | £5.3m | 151 | 30.2 | 72 |
| 5 | E.Le Fée | Sunderland | £5.0m | £4.8m | 147 | 29.4 | 67 |
| 6 | Semenyo | Man City | £7.0m | £8.0m | 202 | 28.9 | 21 |
| 7 | Rice | Arsenal | £6.5m | £7.2m | 184 | 28.3 | 78 |
| 8 | Stach | Leeds | £5.0m | £4.8m | 137 | 27.4 | 47 |
| 9 | Scott | Bournemouth | £5.0m | £4.9m | 136 | 27.2 | — |
| 10 | Ampadu | Leeds | £5.0m | £4.9m | 134 | 26.8 | 40 |
Midfield value sat in the £5.0 to £8.0m band. Five budget options in the top ten. Five mid-price options. Zero premiums. Premium midfielders earned their points this season, but they did not earn them efficiently, and the structural story is the same one as the last several years. One premium midfielder is enough. The budget you save by not pairing them goes a long way at £6.5 to £7.5m.
Forwards
| # | Player | Club | Start £ | End £ | Pts | Pts/£m | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thiago | Brentford | £6.0m | £7.2m | 181 | 30.2 | 63 |
| 2 | Calvert-Lewin | Leeds | £5.5m | £5.8m | 142 | 25.8 | 59 |
| 3 | Kroupi.Jr | Bournemouth | £4.5m | £4.7m | 113 | 25.1 | 49 |
| 4 | João Pedro | Chelsea | £7.5m | £7.4m | 177 | 23.6 | 30 |
| 5 | Welbeck | Brighton | £6.5m | £6.3m | 126 | 19.4 | 42 |
| 6 | Igor Jesus | Nott'm Forest | £6.0m | £5.9m | 114 | 19.0 | 3 |
| 7 | Beto | Everton | £5.5m | £5.1m | 104 | 18.9 | 13 |
| 8 | Watkins | Aston Villa | £9.0m | £8.7m | 167 | 18.6 | — |
| 9 | Richarlison | Spurs | £6.5m | £6.5m | 119 | 18.3 | 16 |
| 10 | Flemming | Burnley | £5.5m | £5.3m | 99 | 18.0 | 35 |
Seven of the top ten forward returns came from the £5.0 to £7.5m band. The premium forward bracket had Haaland and very little else worth chasing. If you weren't picking him, the real efficiency was at mid-price, and Thiago at £6.0m delivered the best forward PPM of the season at 30.2. That's premium-tier production from a player most managers were using as a third forward, when they were using him at all.
What it means for 2026/27
The structural read is consistent with most recent seasons. Cheap and mid-price is where points-per-pound lives. Premium is where points-per-game lives. Both matter, and the question every pre-season is how to balance the two within a £100m budget.
The new wrinkle from 2025/26 is that cheap defenders got significantly more interesting under the new scoring rule. A £4.0 to £4.5m starting defender who racks up CBIT is a different kind of asset than the same-priced enabler from two years ago, and that has real implications for how to build a 2026/27 back four. Last year's £4.0m bench fodder is probably this year's £4.5m starting CBIT contributor. The market will catch up to this, but probably not as quickly as the underlying value will move.