Teams To Avoid — The Toughest Upcoming Fixtures

Where the model actually sees value is Bournemouth and Sunderland. Truffert at £5.5m tops our Bournemouth list, and even against City, Newcastle, Liverpool and Chelsea he's projected for around three points a game — attacking returns doing the heavy lifting rather than clean sheets. Only about 1 in 20 managers have him. Behind him, Kroupi Jr (£7.5m, owned by roughly 1 in 7) and Rayan (£6.5m, barely 1 in 25) land in similar territory: solid rather than spectacular most weeks, with the odd goal turning a quiet score into a big one.

Sunderland's Le Fée (£6.0m) is the pick of this whole group on our numbers — comfortably the best six-week return here, a bit over three a game, and owned by only about 1 in 15. Fulham's Iwobi at £5.5m is almost unowned and projects well, though the model prefers Leno and Robinson ahead of him for reasons of squad structure, not raw points.

The nuance: "very tough for clean sheets" isn't the same as "no points". Leno at £4.5m still projects respectably because busy keepers collect saves, and Ipswich's Davis at £4.0m is a functional bench body. That's the trap, though — Diop is already in about 2 in 10 squads at the same price with a slightly worse outlook. Popularity there is habit, not evidence.

FPL verdict. Avoid Hull and Coventry entirely — the fixtures punish both ends and neither has a player worth the slot. Watch Truffert; at £5.5m he's a fair fifth defender if you need one, but don't pay up for clean sheets that likely aren't coming. The one genuine buy is Le Fée at £6.0m: cheap, lightly owned, and the strongest scorer our projections see in this bracket.