No Salah?
Is there an argument for fading last season's FPL top points scorer?
Challenging orthodoxy and avoiding herd mentality is a key part of getting the right FPL team in place - just like investing in companies.
In fact, if an asset has spiked in price (usually because demand is surging, which may or may not reflect the fundamentals of that asset), it might be precisely the wrong time to invest.
Ask anyone who piled into Bitcoin in November last year, when the price stood at close to £50,000. Fast forward to today and that same asset is valued at less than £20,000. When it comes to FPL and investing, valuation is everything.
Which brings us to FPL’s most expensive asset and the must-have player of last season - Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (MID, £13m).
If you didn’t have Salah in the first half of the campaign, you didn’t win your mini-league - and the Egyptian’s price reflects an expectation that, at the very least, he will match that performance.
As a reminder, in 2020/21 Salah scored 23, assisted 14 and delivered 265 FPL points. That is the second highest points haul of his career.
The case in favour of picking Salah
It isn’t hard to think of reasons to have Salah in your team from Gameweek 1 - and he currently features in over 50% of FPL line-ups.
Salah scored 8.5 points per 90 minutes played last season, outperforming both Tottenham’s Son Heung-min (MID, £12m) (7.8 points per 90 minutes) and Manchester City’s Kevin de Bruyne (MID, £12m) (8.2 points per 90 minutes).
Salah is rarely rotated out by Jurgen Klopp, and that appears even less likely following the departure of Sadio Mane to Bayern Munich.
Mane’s exit also means Salah is once again the undisputed focal point of Liverpool’s potent attack. Furthermore, Liverpool’s early fixtures look relatively soft, with an opening day trip away to newly-promoted Fulham arguably the easiest fixture of the top-priced attacking FPL assets.
So, both statistically and situationally, you can argue Salah is worth the investment.
The case against picking Salah
There are reasons to be cautious, however. Mane’s departure might confirm Salah’s standing as the primary attacking threat at Anfield, but it also deprives him of a dynamic runner and proven Premier League performer.
This is something often discussed in NFL fantasy. One school of thought is that if a team has only one quality wide receiver (whose job it is to catch passes from the quarterback), they are likely to score big because they will be thrown the ball the most often.
However, another school of thought suggests that having a sole pass catcher will allow the opposition defence to key in on that player, assigning their best cornerback (whose job it is to stop the ball getting to wide receivers) to cover him and even potentially employing a double coverage tactic.
Darwin Nunez (FWD, £9m) and Luis Diaz (MID, £8m) are hugely talented, with the latter in particular impressing in his debut season at Liverpool. But they have big shoes to fill and have played just 957 minutes of Premier League football between them.
In short, at this stage we have no idea whether this change of cast will have a positive or negative impact on Salah’s output. The uncertainty over the role Diogo Jota (FWD, £9m) will play further clouds the picture.
As FPL is a game of finite resources (namely your £100m starting budget) you also need to consider what you will be giving up and whether alternative, lower-priced players in certain positions - combined with higher-priced, more productive players in other positions - will boost your overall points output.
To illustrate, below is a team we’ve constructed that includes Salah. In order to accommodate him, a gamble has been taken on Manchester United’ Marcus Rashford (MID, £6.5m), who endured a woeful 2020/21 campaign but could be back in favour at Old Trafford under new manager Erik ten Hag. In addition, we’ve opted for a budget goalkeeper in Brighton’s Robert Sanchez (GK, £4.5m).
Below is a similar team but with Raheem Sterling (MID, £10m) chosen in Salah’s place. Sterling could be one of the value picks of the season after joining Chelsea - a move which should ensure he gets significantly more minutes on the pitch than he did at Man City.
Sterling’s 7 points per 90 minutes last season is 1.5 points shy of Salah, but it’s possible the former will step up as the fulcrum of a talented Chelsea attack while the latter could regress from a high watermark. That would make Sterling a legitimate replacement for Salah without hurting your points total too much.
And in return you can upgrade to Ederson (GK, £5.5m) between the sticks and West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen (MID, £8.5m) in midfield - the fourth highest scoring player in FPL last season.
To put it another way, if you’d picked Salah, Rashford and Sanchez last season, they’d have delivered 454 FPL points.
If you’d gone with Sterling, Bowen and Ederson, you’d have garnered 524 FPL points.
Food for thought.