Chelsea
Stamford Bridge
Chelsea FPL: Who To Own, Captain And Avoid
The call — Chelsea: buy the striker everyone already has, and stop overthinking it Here's the number that matters: about six in ten managers own João Pedro at £7.5m, and barely one in ten owns Cole Palmer at £9.5m. That gap tells you where the market's head is — and for once, the crowd is roughly right.
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Chelsea come into the season with a top-five attack by our reckoning and a run of fixtures that suits it: FUL (A), BHA (H), ARS (A), HUL (H), BRE (A), BOU (H). Take out the trip to the Emirates and that's five games a side this good should be scoring in. Hull at home in particular is the sort of fixture you build a front line around.
João Pedro is our top Chelsea pick. We've got him down for around 22 points across the six — a steady 3-4 most weeks with the odd big one when Chelsea put a team away — and at £7.5m he leaves money in the bank for problems elsewhere. He's the sensible pillar. He's also the template pillar, which some of you will hate. Live with it.
Palmer is the interesting one. Our numbers actually give him more points over the run — nearly 29 — and with hardly anyone owning him, he's the pick if you want to make up ground rather than hold it. The honest caveat: he costs £2m more, and £9.5m midfielders have a habit of punishing you when they blank. If you own neither, Pedro first, Palmer if the budget genuinely allows both.
The back end is where I'd pump the brakes. Chelsea's defence ranks around fifth in the league in our view, but the clean-sheet fixtures are unkind — Fulham away, Arsenal away, Brentford away is not a run I'm paying for shutouts through. Colwill at £5.0m and Sánchez at £5.0m are perfectly decent bench-fodder-plus, owned by almost nobody, but they're plan C, not plan A.
The call: buy João Pedro before Fulham away, take Palmer as well if you can fund him without gutting your defence, and leave the Chelsea backline alone until the fixtures turn friendlier.