Arsenal
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Arsenal FPL: Who To Own, Captain And Avoid
The call — Arsenal: the value is at the back, and it's the £5.8m end of it Here's the plainest thing our numbers say about Arsenal right now: the defence is the fourth-meanest in the league, the attack ranks mid-table eighth, and the fixture list is kind to exactly one end of the pitch. Clean sheets are the product on sale. Goals are…
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Look at the run — Leeds at home, Forest away, Everton at home, then Hull after the Anfield trip. Our model reads that as a very friendly stretch for shut-outs, and a genuinely tough one for attacking returns. So if you're buying into Arsenal over the next six, buy the defence and stop pretending Saka at £9.5m is the entry point. He's a fine player on penalties and corners, roughly 1 in 10 own him, and he'll have his day — but you're paying premium money for an attack our projections rank eighth, into a run that doesn't suit it.
The tables tell you who. What they don't tell you is where the value actually sits. Calafiori at £5.8m projects within a whisker of Gabriel at £8.0m — that's £2.2m of your budget back for near-identical clean-sheet exposure, which is why he tops our list and why about 5 in 10 managers already have him. Raya is the same story through the gloves: one price, the whole defence's clean-sheet potential, plus save points on the bad days.
The honest caveat, and it's a real one: nobody in this squad is fully nailed. Arteta rotates, and every name on the page carries some risk of a rest week. That's also why Konsa at £4.6m is a trap dressed as a bargain — three starts from five is not a floor, it's a coin toss, and a cheap defender who doesn't play is the most expensive thing in FPL. The £1.2m you save on Calafiori buys you actual minutes.
What would change the call? If Arteta starts benching Calafiori for the softer home games, the value shifts to Raya, who catches every clean sheet regardless of which four defenders are in front of him.
Until then: buy Calafiori, take Raya if the budget's tighter, leave Gabriel to managers who like paying £8.0m for the same clean sheet, and hold off on the attackers until the fixtures turn. The defence is the trade here. Make it.