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With popular premium assets like Erling Haaland (£14.0m), Mohamed Salah (£12.5m), Harry Kane (£12.5m) and Trent Alexander-Arnold (£8.0m) attracting hefty price tags, managing your squad budget will be as important as ever this season.

An important aspect to explore when setting up your Gameweek 1 squad is which players give you the most ‘bang for your buck’. Now that the new season prices have been released, we can compare last season’s points totals to this year’s pricing and find out which players offer the best value.

But there is one thing we need to cover before we dive in. Which metric is best to use to for assessing player value?

Metrics for value

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.

Next up is Points Per Match (PPM). This 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 what tends to happen is that the data gets skewed because cheaper players who simply ‘show up’, get over-valued through bagging appearance points. This is why people using this metric often find that defenders (generally cheaper) 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 just appearance points – or even 1-point cameos for late substitutes – are penalised more harshly than players who regularly return. This is because the only thing that they offer is now gone.

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.

Top 20 FPL Players by VAPM

• Trippier - £6.5m - 21.4
• Ødegaard - £8.5m - 21
• Rashford - £9.0m - 20
• Martinelli - £8.0m - 20
• Raya - £5.0m - 19.3
• White - £5.5m - 18.1
• Almirón - £6.5m - 17.7
• Haaland £14.0m - 17.1
• Xhaka - £6.0m - 16.8
• Eze - £6.5m - 16.7
• March - £6.5m - 16.6
• Kane - £12.5m - 16.2
• Alisson - £5.5m - 16.2
• Pope - £5.5m - 16
• Saka - £8.5m - 15.9
• Toney -£8.0m - 15.7
• Mitoma - £6.5m - 15.6
• Leno - £4.5m - 15.5
• Gross - £6.5m - 15.4
• José Sá - £5.0m - 15.2

For the complete list, head over to our Custom Stats Builder and select the VAPM metric, or create your own combined stats.

Key Points

Kieran Trippier (£6.5m) is the best value player based on last season’s points totals relative to this season’s pricing. He is currently owned by 33.5% of FPL managers, although many will be put off by Newcastle’s poor opening fixtures.

Despite being cranked up in price, Arsenal assets such as Martin Ødegaard (£8.5m), Gabriel Martinelli (£8.0m) and Ben White (£5.5m) all make the top six of the list.

Erling Haaland (£14.0m), despite being the first player in years to start the campaign with a £14m price tag, still represents good value despite the huge sum required to invest in him. He makes 8th place on the list.

Eberechi Eze (£6.5m) had a strong season for Crystal Palace and represents great value at £6.5m. Palace looked much stronger under Roy Hodgson at the end of last season and, with reasonable opening fixtures, Eze could be one to watch.

Two players notable by their absence are Mo Salah (£12.5m) and Trent Alexander-Arnold (£8.0m) who do not make the Top 20 best value players. This, of course, must be viewed through the lens that Liverpool had a poor season (by their own standards). Should they get back to their usual blistering form, then both these players could instantly regain their value.

With Haaland owned by over 80% of FPL managers, many are struggling to find room for Harry Kane (£12.5m) who is owned by less than 20% of managers. His 30 goals were particularly impressive given Tottenham’s lack of attacking threat last season and he still represents good value at £12.5m, placing 12th on our list.

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By Matt Whelan