Heading into Gameweek 4, former champion Simon March ponders what is meant when we discuss ‘value’ in Fantasy Premier League (FPL).

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It has been said that, at its core, FPL is a game about getting value for money. We all start with the same budget and whichever one of us gets the highest return on their investment will likely either win FPL or come extremely close.

In its purest form, the ‘value’ we typically refer to in FPL circles is measured in points scored per million spent. This represents something of an oversimplification. Value, in practice, is an amalgamation of different priorities and trade-offs. It is context-dependent and is frequently subject to compromise.

So, what really is ‘value’ in FPL? Is it best viewed through a lens of pragmatism, or should we commit more strongly to its fundamental principles? These questions will be the focus of this week’s article. 

Value is certainty

Despite scoring 217 points last season and being among the most highly-owned players in the game, Manchester City striker Erling Haaland (£15.2m) offered an almost identical return on investment (ROI) to Brentford hitman Neal Maupay, who scored 76 points and was barely owned.

This demonstrates one limitation of a purely points-per-million-oriented approach in FPL. While Maupay plus the extra nine million that we would have had to spend on other players could, in the aggregate, theoretically make up or exceed the 141-point delta between the two strikers, most managers would, in practice, prefer to simply opt for Haaland and the greater sense of point-scoring certainty that owning him offers.

Of course, captaincy is also a big factor here. If you were to double Haaland’s points last season, his value for money starts to look really good. However, this perspective doesn’t account for how spending around 15% of our budget on a single player might limit our captaincy options elsewhere in our squads. It might not feel like it at times but, logically, having a broader range of viable captaincy options to choose from each Gameweek should improve our captaincy scores when compared to perma-captaining a single premium player.

So, while on the one hand, we could say that we are willing to compromise value for money for certainty of points, we could also say that such certainty has a value all of its own. This is especially the case when it comes to captaincy decisions, and we are merely trading it off against the opportunity to maximise our ROI.

Value is a group decision

Comparing Neil Maupay to Erling Haaland is obviously a bit extreme. It is important to acknowledge that there were alternative striker options to Haaland last season who would have delivered a lot of points and still have saved us a lot of money. Indeed, had managers opted for Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins (£8.9m), they would have exceeded Haaland’s points for around six million less.

So why did managers, in general, tend not to do that? Obviously Watkins was well-owned and it was of course also possible to own both players. But Watkins’ ownership, and in particular his effective ownership, was more often than not dwarfed by that of the City striker.

One possible reason for this is the fear factor that comes from owning or captaining one player when we know that so many of our competitors will be backing another player – particularly if the latter has the explosive potential of an Erling Haaland. While we might rationally conclude that there is an opportunity to maximise points by looking elsewhere, we are drawn to highly-owned premiums partly as a loss-limiting method. In the battle of the value acronyms, FOMO often trumps ROI.

From this perspective, ‘value’ in FPL, is what we collectively agree it is. A certain player may not, in literal terms, offer the same ROI as some alternatives but this doesn’t matter all that much to us if everyone is backing that player anyway. The risk on missing out on their points concerns us more than maximising our value for money.

Like tulips, Beanie Babies and GameStop stock at various points throughout history, ‘value’ has a psychological element to it. It is something that we determine collectively. Its significance to us often exceeds any inherent value associated with the subject itself.

Value is Contextual

Taking into account how dynamic FPL is, any value assessment needs to acknowledge the likelihood that its terms will fluctuate throughout stages of the season. Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah, for example, currently costs £12.7m but the theoretical value that this price tag represents would change significantly if his next three fixtures are against teams with weak or strong defences. This, of course, is to some extent true of any player, be they budget or premium-priced. Fixtures are but one of a number of contextual factors that might cause a player’s perceived or actual value to fluctuate throughout a season.

When it comes to value, player cost is, of course, just one side of the value equation. Any contextual factor that might increase or decrease a player’s potential for scoring points will also be significant. With this in mind, it serves us to view value as something dynamic rather than static or monolithic. We need to assess and reassess it throughout the season.

Value is an Enabler

The pursuit of value in FPL doesn’t have to be an ‘either/or’ endeavour. Often our purpose for seeking out bargains is so we can afford the high-scoring premium players.

Most of us, to some extent, play the game this way, whether we’re actively conscious of it or not. It is true that there usually emerges one or two significantly underpriced players, such as Chelsea’s Cole Palmer (£10.6m) last season, who help us along the way.

However, while we might feel like we are getting value for money via this method, we are still ultimately compromising on a true points-per-million approach. We seek high value at lower end of the market in order to afford lower value at the higher end of the market. A purely value-oriented approach would function outside of these parameters.

Conclusion

‘Value’ exists in many forms within FPL and while ‘points per million spent’ is arguably the purest, it is not necessarily the most practical. In all likelihood, the most expensive players in the game, such as Salah and Haaland, will end up among the highest scorers while still not providing optimal value for money in relative terms. 

It is hard to argue, however, that owning these players for their performances over the opening three Gameweeks of this season would not have been at least advantageous. From this perspective, ‘value’ has a temporal, dynamic element to it. We shouldn’t overlook the certainty factor that comes with these ‘reassuringly expensive’ players.

So, is the utopian view of truly maximising value for money realistic? Or will we always seek to build our teams around these high-cost/high-scoring players, even if we could theoretically score more points by more efficiently investing the money elsewhere?

On some level, it is this kind of paradox that statistical modelling and data analytics seeks to solve in FPL. If we can be more confident in the predictive value of underlying performance data, we might commit more freely to a true ROI-oriented approach to player selection. We therefore might be less reticent to look beyond the high-EO premiums as the tentpoles for our squads.

While there are some, not unreasonable, concerns that the mass adoption of predictive data models might lead to excessive homogenisation or templatisation across FPL teams, it is also possible that such models might actually help promote the opposite. It could help move us beyond the current convention of mass-selecting the same enablers in order to fund the mass-selection of the same premiums.