Brighton & Hove Albion FPL: Who To Own, Captain And Avoid — 11 Aug

Brighton's next six: back the midfield, not the back line

Here's the oddity in Brighton's opening run: our model rates their defence as one of the meanest in the league — top six — and still calls the next six fixtures a very tough stretch for clean sheets. Look at the list and you see why. Aston Villa at home, Chelsea away, Arsenal at home. Leeds, Coventry and Sunderland offer breathing room, but three of six games against sides who will create plenty is not the recipe for a defender parade.

The attack is a different story. Brighton carry one of the sharper front units in the league — seventh by our reckoning — and the same fixtures that threaten their goalkeeper suit their forwards fine. Villa, Leeds and Arsenal all come to the American Express Stadium, and Coventry and Sunderland away are the kind of trips where Brighton should score.

Which brings us to the pick our model likes best: Pascal Groß at £5.5m. He's projected for around 21 points over the six — a steady 3-4 a week with the odd bigger return when Brighton click at home — and only about 1 in 10 managers own him. That's what this column exists for: a nailed midfielder at a fair price who plays every minute and never asks you to guess whether he starts. No romance, just returns.

Verbruggen at £4.5m is the second name on the list, and roughly 2 in 10 already have him. He's decent value for a budget keeper — save points keep him ticking even in the hard games — but temper the shutout dreams until Chelsea and Arsenal are out of the way.

The defenders are where I'd pump the brakes. Kadıoğlu and Dunk at £4.5m each project respectably, and Dunk is owned by almost nobody, but you're buying clean-sheet potential into a run our model explicitly flags as unkind. A cheap defender who blanks in three of six is just a cheap blank. Gomez at £5.0m sits below Groß in our ordering for a reason — if you want a Brighton midfielder, take the one the model prefers, not the discount version.

The call: buy Groß now, before the Villa game, and start him every week of this run. Verbruggen is a fine budget keeper if you need one, but hold off on the Brighton defenders until the fixture list stops throwing Chelsea and Arsenal at them.