We’re revealing our Fantasy Premier League (FPL) Team of the Season following a week of voting from the Fantasy Football Scout userbase.
Over 20,000 votes were cast in total which, even allowing for the multiple votes permitted per person, was still an excellent response.
Seven players (one goalkeeper, three defenders, two midfielders and one forward; the bare minimum for each position in FPL) made it into the XI from the initial position-by-position polls, with the run-off vote the decider for the other four spots.
TEAM OF THE SEASON – GOALKEEPER VOTE
Aaron Ramsdale was the comfortable victor in our goalkeepers’ vote, canvassing not far off half the vote.
A total of 12 clean sheets in 34 starts was only bettered by those representing the top four, while only Alisson could beat him for bonus (14) across the season.
The former Sheffield United man did it all from a starting price of just £4.5m, too.
Ten successive blanks meant that the season ended on a slightly sour note but Ramsdale still ended with a very respectable 4.0 points per match.
TEAM OF THE SEASON – DEFENDER VOTE
The three players who scored the most points among FPL defenders, Joao Cancelo, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andrew Robertson, cruised into our end-of-year XI.
Outside of Ben Chilwell, who made just seven appearances, these three full-backs had the best points-per-match averages (5.6, 6.5 and 6.4) of any FPL defender.
The trio ended the season on a combined 40 attacking returns, 82 bonus points and 54 clean sheets between them.
Alexander-Arnold was tantalisingly close to breaking the all-time record for most FPL points by a defender in a season.
Antonio Rudiger only just edged out Joel Matip to take fifth place in our poll.
TEAM OF THE SEASON – MIDFIELDER VOTE
Only two midfielders automatically made it through to the Team of the Season, so there were few surprises when FPL’s highest points-scorers, Mohamed Salah and Son Heung-min, were given the nod.
Son ended up 50 points clear of third-place Alexander-Arnold in the overall standings, just to ram home these two wingers’ achievements.
The pair ended up sharing the Golden Boot award after finishing on 23 goals apiece, while a combined 24 assists and 56 bonus points were also banked.
Salah and Son averaged 7.6 and 7.4 points per match respectively, league-leading totals discounting Chilwell.
Jarrod Bowen, Kevin De Bruyne and Bukayo Saka made it through to the run-off vote, more of which below
TEAM OF THE SEASON – FORWARD VOTE
Harry Kane cruised into our Team of the Season, with most responders in our forwards’ poll nominating the Spurs striker.
One of only two forwards among FPL’s 30 highest points-scorers (Cristiano Ronaldo was the other), even Kane struggled for a while with 12 blanks in his first 13 appearances.
The arrival of Antonio Conte eventually sparked an upturn in his performances and FPL returns, however: 16 goals and 10 assists arrived in his final 24 matches.
In the Conte era, which started in Gameweek 11, he recorded at least 45 more points than any other forward.
Ronaldo and Ivan Toney finished second and third, with the early-season exploits of Michail Antonio and the bargain-bin Emmanuel Dennis soured by their subsequent droughts.
TEAM OF THE SEASON – RUN-OFF VOTE
As mentioned earlier, our run-off poll effectively gave managers the chance to decide on our formation by voting for the final four players.
It was fitting that, in this season of misfiring forwards, we ended up with a 4-5-1 as Toney and Ronaldo were given the cold shoulder.
Jarrod Bowen was the clear favourite of many, backed by the vast majority of responders. One of just five players to break the 200-point barrier in 2021/22, he produced 12 goals and a league-high 17 assists from a starting price of only £6.5m.
No player in his Fantasy position could beat him for value (aka ‘points per million’), while his average of 5.7 points per match was the best of any sub-£10.0m midfielder.
Kevin De Bruyne joins the premium-heavy line-up, having scored a career-high 15 Premier League goals in 2021/22.
His season was similar to that of Kane, with the Belgian making a slow start but then amassing 21 goal contributions in 20 appearances from Gameweek 17 onwards.
A four-goal display in the 5-1 win at Wolverhampton Wanderers in Double Gameweek 36 was one of the stand-out FPL moments of the season.
Like Bowen, Bukayo Saka offered tremendous value from a £6.5m starting price. Indeed, the West Ham United man was the only midfielder who could better Saka for points per million.
A reliable starter who featured in every single Arsenal match this season, he was one of just six sub-£10.0m FPL options who hit 20 attacking returns or more in 2021/22.
It was a Chelsea face-off for our 11th and final spot in our Team of the Season, with the explosive, erratic form of Reece James seeing him get the edge over the more slow-and-steady Antonio Rudiger.
Underpriced at £5.5m back in August, James managed 21 FPL returns (be they attacking or defensive in nature) from as many starts.
He averaged almost as many points per start (6.3) as Robertson (6.4) and Alexander-Arnold (6.5).
A rate of 0.67 attacking returns per 90 minutes was also comfortably better than what the Liverpool premium pair were delivering.
TEAM OF THE SEASON – THE LINE-UP
TEAM OF THE SEASON – IN PRACTISE
We didn’t place any budgetary constraints on our Team of the Season and, as a result, the line-up below would have cost an undoable £90.5m at the start of 2021/22 (Ramsdale entered in Gameweek 2, so we’ll assume a £4.5m placeholder deputised initially for the purposes of this calculation).
- Ramsdale: £4.5m
- Cancelo: £6.0m
- Alexander-Arnold: £7.5m
- Robertson: £7.0m
- James: £5.5m
- Salah: £12.5m
- Son: £10.0m
- Bowen: £6.5m
- De Bruyne: £12.0m
- Saka: £6.5m
- Kane: £12.5m
A maximum of £83.5m could have been spent on a starting XI in Gameweek 1, with £16.5m set aside for the cheapest possible combination of substitutes: a £4.0m goalkeeper, two £4.0m defenders and a £4.5m midfielder or forward. That would only have been possible with a three-man backline, however.
Here, we’ve made a few changes to our squad – one of which is replacing Ramsdale with Vicente Guaita so that we have a playing goalkeeper from the outset – to see how this viable ‘ghost team’ would have fared:
- Guaita: £4.5m
- Cancelo: £6.0m
- Alexander-Arnold: £7.5m
- Matip: £5.0m
- Cash: £5.0m
- Laporte: £5.5m
- Salah: £12.5m
- Son: £10.0m
- Bowen: £6.5m
- Maddison: £7.0m
- Kane: £12.5m
—————— - Foster: £4.0m
- Dennis: £5.0m
- Ramsey: £4.5m
- Gelhardt: £4.5m
The points tallies for our starting XI were as follows:
- Guaita: 119
- Cancelo: 201
- Alexander-Arnold: 208
- Matip: 170
- Cash: 147
- Laporte: 160
- Salah: 265
- Son: 258
- Bowen: 206
- Maddison: 181
- Kane: 192
A Salah perma-captaincy, coupled with a Maddison vice-captaincy, takes us to 2,423 points.
Auto-substitutions would have been needed in 27 different Gameweeks, with 61 no-shows from our first XI in total – whether that be because of benchings, injury, illness, suspension or postponements.
By our back-of-a-fag-packet calculations, our autosubs would have brought in an additional 181 points.
That takes us to 2,604 points, enough to rank us in 16,869th place without the deployment of any transfers or chips.
Let us know below the line if you have stumbled on a ghost team formula that could have done better!
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