Building a Better Defense in the Aggregate
Can five budget defenders give enough value to warrant avoiding pricier picks?
If you can excuse a slightly self-indulgent introduction, I am going to talk about my own team for a second as a way to ground an otherwise abstract debate. For context, my own team value is very low (£101.0m) and I’m pretty much all in on holding Salah, Palmer, and likely Saka for the long term (for a combined £33.7m). Assuming you also drop one or two mid-range attacking options in too (Mbeumo, Jackson, Isak, Fernandes) then money very quickly becomes very tight. Some teams can afford all those players and still have room for Gabriel, but for me it’s something of an either/or proposition.
The methodology here is to look at clean sheets. There is an argument to simply solving your team based on expected points, but I want to try and control for some of the additional noise that brings with individual xMins and the attacking threat of some defenders. Here I just want to isolate if it’s possible to channel your inner Billy Beane and recreate an Arsenal-level FPL defense in the aggregate.
Consider the two teams below which are close to some options I’m considering for my own team:
Per FPLReview, these two options give the same EV (within 0.1) and evaluate very closely (option 2 is slightly ahead). Individual tastes may vary but for arguments sake let’s agree that Fernandes is a quite a bit better than Mbeumo for the coming weeks (+7 EV per Review), Gabriel is a lot better than Dunk (+8 EV), and the two forwards are close but Cunha (+2 EV) is probably a safer bet given Pedro’s xMins.
Option 2 is certainly a fine team but if you lock in the premium midfielders and Gabriel then the only real “flex” spots in the team are Jackson and Mbeumo (£15.5m combined). There is some concern that if, for example, you wanted that combo to include someone like Son, Foden, or De Bruyne, you are quite limited who to pair with them). Also, while I like both Jimenez and Pedro, there is nowhere else to really go in that price bracket if needed, which limits future flexibility.
The “flex” slots in Option 1 are Fernandes and Jackson (£16.3m) and also Cunha who can still become Wood, Welbeck, Wissa, or Pedro, and you aren’t impossibly far away from the likes of Solanke or someone like Darwin or Gakpo if we had an xMins shift. With that mind, I personally like the idea of Option 1 but I’m concerned we are giving up too much defensively. How though, does a five-man rotation of budget defenders compare to one with Gabriel locked in there every week?
Five-man rotation
I’m using Review’s raw clean sheet odds and we are solving to start just three defenders each week. I’m ignoring the goalkeeper position as whether you have Raya or not, the debate to get a second Arsenal defender remains relevant. As a starting point if we simply look at the average clean sheet odds over the next 12 gameweeks we get Villa, Brighton, Chelsea, Fulham, and Newcastle as viable teams who offer good clean sheets odd and a defensive option that costs £4.5m or less (I’m personally excluding Man Utd here as they would be the joint-lowest side in clean sheet odds in this sample while also coming with a ton of uncertainty with the new manager coming in). We’ll also then add Konate to the mix as (a) Liverpool have very good numbers and Konate is still affordable at 5.4m, and more selfishly (b) he’s in my own team.
Option 1: Five Players At £4.5m Or Less
Rotating this group for 12 gameweeks allows you to enjoy:
facing Ipswich, Leicester, Southampton, Wolves, and Everton 20 times, which represents 56% of all your fixtures.
64% of your fixtures at home
only two games against last season’s top-seven attacking sides (Colwill and Hall both against Villa at home)
zero games in which Review rates the clean sheet odd below 25%
an average clean sheet rate of 32% in the games you are starting your defenders
Option 2: Adding Konate to the mix
Konate is currently a unique player in FPL as I believe he’s the only player available in that ~£5.5m or less range who has very good xMins while playing for one of the league’s three elite defenses (Arsenal, Man City, and Liverpool). Rico Lewis could be that guy but isn’t quite there with the xMins, and Timber has emerged due to White’s injury, but he has his own xMins concerns whether via injury or rotation risk.
Rotating this group for 12 gameweeks allows you to enjoy:
facing Ipswich, Leicester, Southampton, Wolves, and Everton 21 times, which represents 58% of all your fixtures.
only two games against last season’s top-seven attacking sides (Colwill against Villa at home and Konate’s trip to Newcastle)
zero games in which Review rates the clean sheet odd below 25%
an average clean sheet rate of 34% in the games you are starting your defenders
If I was wildcarding today, for an extra million pounds I am not sure if I would add Konate, although who would then be the fifth option is a major question (if Konsa is indeed out). This analysis excludes someone like Ait-Nouri (4.7m) due to Wolves low clean sheets odds, but the fullback does of course bring additional attacking threat. In this system where you are looking to really utilize all five slots to maximize your rotation though, I would possibly lean towards not adding Ait-Nouri to the mix (as an existing owner I am fine to keep him though, for now). That said, in this setup, he could easily replace Hall who is only slotted to play four times in the next nine GWs, during weeks which Ait-Nouri would face BOU(H), WHU(A), IPS(H), LEI(A): all very playable games.
Liverpool’s fixtures are good but in these next 12 GWs they do face 7 away games which has historically been a lesser source of clean sheets for this side. Now, in the small sample we have under Slot, Liverpool are actually doing better defensively away from Anfield, with just 0.8 xGC90 compared to 0.9 xGC90 at home. Take that with a healthy dose of salt though.
One slight concern with Konate is who the exit route would be, if he were to get injured or in the very unlikely event he suddenly started losing starts. I suppose that could just be Joe Gomez (or Quansah if he came back into the fold after apparently falling into Slot’s bad books after the GW1 start). You can of course downgrade to one of the other aforementioned budget options, but then you’re spending transfers just to get back to option one (assuming you then re-deployed any savings to make the upgrade we are trying to unlock here).
Option 3: Adding an Arsenal defender
I am assuming for a second that by “Arsenal defender” we mean one with very secure xMins, so either Gabriel (£6.1m) or Saliba (£6.0m). I think Gabriel remains the better of those two options thanks to his attacking threat, but either are fine for these purposes. Both seem to be sufficiently more secure than Calefiori (£5.8m) to warrant the premium. Timber (£5.5m) is intriguing and comes at only £0.1m more than Konate meaning there is no additional price to way elsewhere in your team between this option and option 2 if you were to go with the Dutch defender. As noted earlier though, Timber does come with added risk that potentially undermines part of the value of this project, which would be have five ~reliable~ options to keep for the foreseeable future and allow transfers to be stockpiled to make higher impacting moves elsewhere in the team (such as restructuring to get Haaland back for his fixture swing in GW18).
On the face it, you can immediately see the value of Gabriel, who Review suggests we’d play every gameweek, even for a tough trip to the Amex or the North London derby (when Colwill would be benched for Bournemouth at home). With this group we enjoy:
facing Ipswich, Leicester, Southampton, Wolves, and Everton 18 times, which represents 50% of all your fixtures.
56% of your fixtures at home
only three games against last season’s top-seven attacking sides (Gabriel against Spurs and Villa, and Colwill against Villa)
zero games in which Review rates the clean sheet odd below 25% and only seven games with a clean sheet score under 30%
an average clean sheet rate of 35% in the games you are starting your defenders
There are of course a near-infinite number of other options, and we can play with the Arsenal double up if that suits your team. However, with Saka still a relevant option in midfield, I wouldn’t want a defensive triple up for Arsenal, and still think Raya and a defender will make most sense for most teams, so I’m not dwelling on that here.
Can we draw any conclusions?
There is no doubt that Gabriel and/or Konate give you more “high” chance games at a clean sheet, with those 40-50% odds jumping off the page here. However, in the aggregate, that budget defense looks like it can come close to competing with the pricier option. £1.7m saved from Gabriel or £1.0 from Konate is a potential useful sum of money, allowing moves such as a budget keeper to Raya (which partially covers Gabriel anyway), Jackson or Solanke to Isak, or Mbeumo to Fernandes.
Each option does have its own risks though. Options 2 and 3 store more value in one player so if they get injured you are almost immediately forced into making a move. The exit routes from Gabriel are better than Konate, the latter whom likely necessitates a downgrade to a budget option anyway. Spreading your minutes across the back five limits the impact of one injury, but we’re significantly less certain on the quality of those defenses, and I don’t have anywhere near the same conviction that Brighton or Newcastle can notch ~three clean sheets in this period compared to how confident I am that Arsenal can deliver ~five.
There is also a replacement risk with the budget option too, as we’re already seeing with Konsa being a risk at the time of writing. It isn’t obvious who on Villa you would move to, and if you pick a new team, you just have to then hope that someone else had fixtures that align with the gaps you need. That said, this rotation doesn’t have many - or really any - weeks with two terrible matchups where one injury can force you into playing a horrible fixture. If, for example, your Konsa replacement had a poor GW14 fixture (when you had hoped to play Konsa against Brentford at home) and now you are forced to play Dunk at Fulham - it isn’t the end of the world.
I am personally quite keen to pivot from my original strategy - which aimed for Verbruggen in goal - and instead add Raya between the sticks and then work towards a cheaper five-man rotation. As it stands, I will likely stick with Ait-Nouri over Hall, but otherwise move towards the “Konate” option 2. If we see any slip in Liverpool’s defensive data, or any suggestion that Konate is an xMins risk, I think I would lean towards downgrading to option one, rather than trying to find the money to get up to option 3.
Let me know on BlueSky what your defensive plans are, and how much they do or don’t focus around Arsenal and these other elite options.