The Best Value FPL Picks 2024/25

With all player prices now released, the main talking point in Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is the record-breaking pricing of Erling Haaland at £15.0m. This is historic, as no player has ever started above £14.0m. This high price may deter many FPL managers who previously considered Haaland an essential buy, leading to more divergence in team templates.

But Haaland is not the only one. This season there are six attacking players who are priced at £9.5m or more, including previous ‘cheat code’ Cole Palmer (£10.5m) who received a record breaking price increase – who is up a staggering £5.5m from his starting price last season – and Mohamed Salah (£12.5m) who remains unchanged.

FPL Launch Offer: Get full Premium Plus preseason access for just £1! This includes first drafts from all Elite XI: Team Reveal managers, who boast an impressive 83 top 10k finishes.

👉 Click here now to claim your £1 Premium Plus access. Don't miss out—this offer is available for a limited time only.

Fitting these premiums into our FPL squads will be more challenging than ever! Therefore, identifying the best value players will be crucial to maintaining a balanced squad given these significant price increases.

Before we dive in, we need to quickly discuss the best metric to use for assessing player value.

Best Value FPL Players: Which Metric is the Most Effective?

There are many different metrics for assessing Fantasy Premier League player value, each with their relative merits and downsides.

Points Per 90 Minutes (PP90) standardises the returns of all players. The advantage with this is it highlights players who may have missed a portion of the season due to injury and whose FPL points totals will naturally be lower, despite good performances when fit.

The disadvantage with the metric is that substitutions will skew the data and will highlight players who are not first choice as amongst the best options. A way around this is to use a slightly different metric.

Points Per Match (PPM) remedies the issue of overly valuing low-minutes players, but still makes it difficult to compare the value of players at different price points.

In order to compare value, you need to combine two metrics. That’s where Points Per Match Per £1m (PPMM) comes in. This then enables us to compare the points generated by a player relative to their value.

This still isn’t perfect because the data ends up skewed because cheaper players who simply ‘show up’, get over-valued through obtaining appearance points. This is why people using this metric often find that cheaper players (such as defenders and goalkeepers) appear to offer more value than they do in reality.

To combat the above problem, we need to use a new metric: VAPM.

What is VAPM?

Value Added Per £1m (VAPM) eliminates the issue by deducting 2 points from PPM and dividing the new total by price. What this effectively does is remove appearance points from the equation. This means that lower value players, who routinely earn appearance points – or even 1-point cameos for late substitutes – are penalised (because the only thing they offer is removed).

This deduction is applied across the board and so what we are left with is a player’s ability to return points beyond simply turning up and playing 90 minutes. This gives a much better comparison of value at different price points and is the metric we have used in this article.

The VAPM metric can be accessed using the Custom Stats Builder.

Top 20 FPL Players by VAPM

Key Points

Cole Palmer (£10.5m) is the best value player, by a significant margin, despite his enormous price hike. He is currently owned by 55.3% of FPL managers, making him the third most highly owned player at the time of writing. This is not surprising given that Palmer was last season’s top goal-scorer with 22.

It is worthy of note that 9 of the 22 goals (over 40%) were penalties. According to Opta Stats Sandbox, no other team were awarded more penalties than Chelsea (11) last season. Should these penalties dry up, this would represent a decrease in Palmer’s returns. Although, as someone who earned 13 FPL assists (3rd best), goals are not Palmer’s only route to points.

The drop from top spot to second is significant and is occupied by Crystal Palace forward Jean-Philippe Mateta (£7.5m). The French forward was one of the clear beneficiaries of the appointment of new manager Oliver Glasner. He is one of several potential forwards priced at £7.5 million for the 2023/24 season who are likely to be popular.

Since taking over in Gameweek 28 of the 2023/24 season, Glasner rejuvenated Palace; Mateta scored 12 goals in this period, compared to 4 under Roy Hodgson. According to Opta Player Heatmaps, this represents a rise from 0.25 goals per 90 minutes to 1.25.

Phil Foden (£9.5m) lands just behind Mateta in third place. For many seasons, Foden’s ability has been there for all to see. Reluctance to bring him into our squads has always been grounded in apprehension regarding his game time. Last season, however, he bagged more minutes for Manchester City than in any previous campaign (2,860 from 33 starts - as shown in the Opta Stats Sandbox tool below – only Rodrigo (£6.5m) earned more game time).

Should Foden continue to be a favoured starter under Pep Guardiola, he represents excellent value. Even more so next season, as he is the sort of player who will avail of the new changes to the BPS scoring. Two of the more significant changes (points awarded for being fouled and shots on target) will greatly benefit Phil Foden, who bagged 60 and 48, respectively, last season.

Newcastle’s Anthony Gordon (£7.5m) is ranked the fourth best value player. At £7.5m, Gordon delivered a very reasonable return rate at that price point. He is ranked second for FPL assists (16) and scored 11 goals. Newcastle have a solid start to the season and, according to the Fixture Difficulty Ratings tool, are ranked top for attacking difficulty in the first four Gameweeks.

Interestingly, Arsenal’s Ben White (£6.5m) makes fifth spot despite a price increase from last season and is one of only three defenders (all Arsenal) to make the Top 20 VAPM list. The highest scoring defender last season with 182 FPL points, White added 9 goal involvements to 18 clean sheets, to secure the top spot amongst defenders.

By Matt Whelan