The 2025/26 rule change added a new dimension to defender and midfielder value. These were the players who earned it.
The biggest FPL scoring change in years arrived in 2025/26. Defenders earned 2 points for any match with 10 or more combined clearances, blocks, interceptions, and tackles. Midfielders and forwards earned the same 2 points at a higher 12-CBIT threshold. Goalkeepers were unaffected. One bonus per match, with no escalator for racking up larger totals.
On paper this looked like a small rule. In practice it reshaped the value of the entire defender bracket. A starting centre-back who used to be a clean-sheet bet, boom-or-bust by definition, became a player who could reliably produce a 2-point floor most weeks even when his team conceded. That floor is what made the 2025/26 budget-defender bracket genuinely interesting in a way it hadn't been for several seasons.
The top 25 below averaged an estimated 730 points each from defensive contributions alone. That figure is worth pausing on. The bonus stream did not exist before this season, and now it has to be priced into how every defender and defensive midfielder is evaluated.
| # | Player | Pos | Club | CBIT | Total Pts | Est. CBIT pts | End £ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anderson | MID | Nott'm Forest | 515 | 180 | 1030 | £5.7m |
| 2 | Garner | MID | Everton | 458 | 159 | 916 | £5.2m |
| 3 | Senesi | DEF | Bournemouth | 419 | 175 | 838 | £5.2m |
| 4 | Ampadu | MID | Leeds | 416 | 134 | 832 | £4.9m |
| 5 | J.Gomes | MID | Wolves | 387 | 107 | 774 | £5.3m |
| 6 | Scott | MID | Bournemouth | 386 | 136 | 772 | £4.9m |
| 7 | Rice | MID | Arsenal | 376 | 184 | 752 | £7.2m |
| 8 | Tarkowski | DEF | Everton | 376 | 170 | 752 | £5.8m |
| 9 | Lacroix | DEF | Crystal Palace | 370 | 154 | 740 | £5.2m |
| 10 | M.Fernandes | MID | West Ham | 369 | 135 | 738 | £5.5m |
| 11 | Caicedo | MID | Chelsea | 366 | 110 | 732 | £5.7m |
| 12 | Xhaka | MID | Sunderland | 362 | 124 | 724 | £5.1m |
| 13 | Virgil | DEF | Liverpool | 352 | 175 | 704 | £6.1m |
| 14 | Szoboszlai | MID | Liverpool | 338 | 160 | 676 | £7.1m |
| 15 | Yarmoliuk | MID | Brentford | 338 | 104 | 676 | £5.0m |
| 16 | Andersen | DEF | Fulham | 329 | 123 | 658 | £4.4m |
| 17 | E.Le Fée | MID | Sunderland | 319 | 147 | 638 | £4.8m |
| 18 | Collins | DEF | Brentford | 319 | 129 | 638 | £4.9m |
| 19 | Van Hecke | DEF | Brighton | 317 | 148 | 634 | £4.7m |
| 20 | Florentino | MID | Burnley | 313 | 84 | 626 | £5.0m |
| 21 | Alderete | DEF | Sunderland | 312 | 125 | 624 | £4.1m |
| 22 | Richards | DEF | Crystal Palace | 311 | 128 | 622 | £4.4m |
| 23 | Milenković | DEF | Nott'm Forest | 311 | 119 | 622 | £5.1m |
| 24 | Zubimendi | MID | Arsenal | 307 | 133 | 614 | £4.9m |
| 25 | Wharton | MID | Crystal Palace | 303 | 112 | 606 | £5.0m |
The leaderboard is dominated by deep-lying midfielders and centre-backs, which are the two roles whose underlying actions most often clear the CBIT threshold. Wing-backs and full-backs appear where their defensive workload was high, but the more attacking the full-back, the further down the list they tend to sit.
The two charts tell a clear story together. Defender CBIT totals at the top of the league were comfortably higher than midfielder totals, which is predictable because the threshold is lower and the role naturally produces more of these actions. But the midfielder leaderboard shows a tighter, smaller cluster of names doing it consistently, and those are the players whose CBIT contribution is a feature of how they play, not a function of one or two heavy defensive shifts.
Defensive contributions stay in the scoring system, so the value shift here isn't a one-season blip. It's a permanent rebalancing of how the defender bracket should be priced. The actionable read is to prefer CBIT-heavy starting defenders over rotational clean-sheet bets at the same price, and to treat defensive midfielders as a real bracket worth scouting rather than a budget-enabler afterthought.
The longer-term question is whether FPL's pricing model has fully caught up. Twelve months into the rule, several of the names on this page were still priced as if it didn't exist. That gap should narrow in 2026/27, but it probably won't close completely. Where it doesn't, the value is on this leaderboard.