Ivan Toney (£7.3m) won’t play again this calendar year after he was handed an eight-month ban from all football-related activity for breaching Football Association (FA) rules.

The suspension kicks in immediately, meaning that Toney will miss the final two matches of the current campaign.

He’ll not be able to play again until January 17 next season, meaning that he’ll miss at least the first half of 2023/24 and only return after the planned winter break.

He will, however, be permitted to train from mid-September onwards.

Toney was also fined £50,000 by the FA and “warned as to his future conduct”.

The Brentford striker had been charged with 262 breaches of FA betting rules, admitting to 232 of them; the other 30 were dropped.

In response, the Bees hinted that they may appeal:

“Brentford FC is currently awaiting the publication of the written reasons of the independent Regulatory Commission. We will review them before considering our next steps.” – Brentford FC club statement

FPL IMPACT

Owned by just under 7.5% of the top 100,000 FPL managers and 26.4% overall (‘ghost’ teams will account for a lot of that figure), Toney is, and probably will finish as, the third highest-scoring forward in FPL.

An impressive 20 Premier League goals helped him to a total of 182 points, averaging at 5.5 per match.

Toney’s absence likely means more game-time for Kevin Schade (£4.9m) and Yoane Wissa (£5.3m) in the run-in, although they will still probably be competing for one spot alongside Bryan Mbeumo (£5.6m) given that Thomas Frank tends to use a 3-5-2 against the so-called ‘bigger’ clubs – and the Bees face Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City in Gameweeks 37 and 38 respectively.

Mbeumo looks set to deputise on penalties and has four attacking returns in three starts without Toney in the side this season.

We’ll take a look through some Toney replacements in a follow-up article but for Members, here are the Rate My Team points projections for £8.0m-and-under forwards for the final two Gameweeks: