Eight-time top 10k finisher Zophar mulls over three hot topics ahead of Gameweek 8 of Fantasy Premier League (FPL): keeping or selling Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.1m), hopping on/off premium midfielders, and the upside of mid-price forwards compared to their budget counterparts.

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With it being the international break and the usual Q&A to follow next week, I thought I would use this article to pen my thoughts on the questions I’m asking myself for the upcoming schedule.

Is it time to hop off Trent Alexander-Arnold?

As the above image from the Season Ticker shows, Liverpool had the most favourable schedule in the league over the first seven Gameweeks. The only ‘difficult’ fixture was the away trip to Manchester United – and we all know how that turned out. 

Arne Slot’s side have kept five clean sheets in seven games and conceded only two goals. If we were to extrapolate that to the entire season, it would break all sorts of records. 

But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to conclude that’s not going to happen, especially when you look at the schedule for the Reds on the other side of the second international break:

Liverpool play Chelsea, Arsenal, Villa and Manchester City in four of the next six matches. The other games are Brighton and Southampton. There’s also the European and domestic schedule to consider; they do not have a free midweek anytime soon:

They travel to Leipzig between Chelsea and Arsenal, host Leverkusen prior to Villa, and entertain Real Madrid before Manchester City. Games we consider prime for Fantasy investment, such as the Southampton match, could see rotation or early substitutions. 

Is now the time to hop off Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.1m) and spread that money elsewhere, perhaps going for two premiums in midfield such as Bukayo Saka (£10.1m)/Phil Foden (£9.2m) and Cole Palmer (£10.8m)? 

With the massive hauls coming from the premium midfielders recently, I’m wary of building a narrative in order to bring myself to sell Alexander-Arnold. As the numbers below show, he is in a league of his own in terms of attacking numbers: his 2.88 non-penalty expected goal involvements (NPxGI) are well clear of second-placed Leif Davis (£4.5m, 1.68):

Do we pick and stick with the premium midfielders or hop on/off with fixtures?

Right when the prices were released, it was clear that this season was going to be different from last. There was no way you could own Erling Haaland (£15.4m), Saka, Palmer, Foden and Mohamed Salah (£12.7m) like last season. Every week, there are going to be 2-3 premium, quality assets you don’t own who are capable of a haul.

The initial thinking was to look for the best schedules and jump on/off the premium assets depending on fixture difficulty. However, I think with the data we have, and although it is limited and skewed by fixture difficulty/freak occurrences like that Brighton and Hove Albion game, we can potentially look to rank them.

Haaland is not included in this for now, although he is of course expendable as many of the no-Haaland teams in the upper-rank echelons have shown.

However, someone like Palmer we need to think about. Chelsea’s next four games are against Liverpool, Newcastle United, Arsenal and Manchester United. Do we invest in Palmer for that run or do we keep faith in someone like Saka?

Fixtures do matter. Saka’s numbers for the last two home matches were absurd both in terms of shots and chance creation. He simply did not have the same numbers away to Tottenham Hotspur etc.

But despite his high shot volume, his xG per shot remains low. I think he is more of a ‘trickler’ than someone like Palmer, who is capable of a 20-point haul – as he has shown us twice already. The win over Southampton was only the second time in his career that Saka has had three attacking involvements in a game.

Then there’s someone like Foden, who has the most potential for rank gains given his low ownership and the best fixture schedule over the upcoming four weeks. However, he is clearly not fully up to speed yet and with Kevin De Bruyne (£9.4m) potentially back after the international break, could we see rotation for Foden? It’s possible and his minutes are nowhere near as secure as those of Palmer or Saka.

Now, a lot of this could be rendered pointless if Saka is ruled out for an extended period with the injury he suffered while playing for England. But it’s a larger question, especially now that Son Heung-min (£9.9m) is nearing a return to fitness for Spurs’ excellent run.

Teams like Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool etc will continue to score goals irrespective of fixtures and these talismanic midfielders will continue to be involved. So this is something worth thinking about over the break.

The mid-priced forwards offer so much more than the budget ones

Ignoring Haaland in the above image, it is clear that the other top four forwards for NPxGI are all priced at £7.5m or over. The numbers they are posting are significant and not too far behind Haaland for significantly cheaper – in Dominic Solanke’s (£7.6m) case it is less than half Haaland’s price. And Solanke has missed two games!

When you compare that to some of the other popular budget forwards, such as Dominic Calvert-Lewin (£6.0m), who has less than half (2.49) the NPxGI as Nicolas Jackson (£7.9m, 5.40), I am asking myself: why not spend the extra £1.5m-£2m? You are getting entry into teams with much better attacking potential. Granted, Jackson has his own issues of xMins but players like Solanke and Kai Havertz (£8.3m) are nailed for 90 minutes and posting great numbers.

I think spending extra on that position gives you a bigger upgrade than say a Dwight McNeil (£5.7m) to a Jarrod Bowen (£7.4m) in midfield. 

We discuss some of these thoughts and more on this week’s episode of the FPL Wire, where we take stock of the seven Gameweeks so far. You can check it out here.

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