Crystal Palace
Selhurst Park
Crystal Palace FPL: Who To Own, Captain And Avoid
The call — Nobody at Crystal Palace is nailed. Not one player. The best any of them has managed is four starts, and that includes the £4.5m left-back who tops our list of who to own. When your most dependable asset is a rotation risk, the rest of the conversation gets short.
What has not being with FFIQ cost you this season?
One squad, picked before a ball was kicked and run for six gameweeks on three transfers — no hits taken. Scored on FPL’s own results.
Your name and your FPL team name. That is all it takes, and we will have your answer before you have finished reading this sentence.
↓ Start here — your name, then your team.
No FPL password, ever. We only read what FPL already publishes.
Here's the shape of it. Palace's attack is respectable — top half of the league on our numbers — but they're about to run into a very tough stretch for it: Forest at home is fine, but then it's Brighton away, Newcastle at Selhurst, Spurs away, Liverpool at home. Coventry away at the end is the reward for surviving all that. Meanwhile the defence sits among the leakiest five in the league, and even an average run of clean-sheet fixtures doesn't turn a bad back line into a good one.
So where's the value? At the back, oddly enough — Mitchell at £4.5m and Richards at £5.0m lead our rankings, purely because they're cheap enough that a start and the odd clean sheet covers the cost. Fewer than 1 in 10 managers own Mitchell; practically nobody owns Richards. In midfield, Kamada at £5.0m actually projects the most points of anyone in the squad, and Yeremy carries the set-piece work — free kicks and corners — which is usually where cheap midfield value hides. Usually. Here it comes attached to three starts and no guarantee of a fourth.
And note what's missing: Mateta holds the penalties and still doesn't crack our list of who to own. When the pen taker can't make the cut, that tells you how the productive minutes are being shared around.
The honest reading: every one of these players is priced for a job he isn't certain to keep. A £4.5m defender who starts is a lovely thing. A £4.5m defender who might start, behind a bottom-five defence, facing Newcastle, Spurs and Liverpool in a four-week window, is just a cheaper way to score two points.
The call: pass. If Palace name the same back line two weeks running, Mitchell becomes a perfectly sensible fifth defender at £4.5m — that's the trigger to move. Until then, spend your enabler money on someone whose manager has picked him twice in a row.