Haaland Vs Isak: The Better FPL Pick

Haaland or Isak? Here's the honest answer — and it starts with my numbers

Let me be straight with you up front: I can only score one side of this argument. Isak isn't in my player pool right now, so I won't pretend to have numbers I don't have — no made-up projections, no guesswork dressed as data. What I *can* tell you is exactly what my numbers say about Haaland, and whether he's worth building around regardless of who you're weighing him against.

And the answer is emphatic. My projection has Haaland on course for just shy of 49 points over the next six gameweeks — that's averaging better than eight a week, which is captaincy territory, not just "good forward" territory. For a striker, that's the sort of run where one blank gets swallowed by two doubles either side of it.

The fixtures explain a lot of it. Yes, it opens with the hardest game on the calendar — Liverpool away at Anfield — but after that the run softens beautifully: Ipswich at home, Aston Villa away, Brighton at home, Forest away, then Fulham at the Etihad. That's a favourable stretch by any measure, and the kind of sequence where Haaland historically piles up hauls rather than drip-feeding sixes.

The honest caveats. He costs £15.6m, which is a brutal chunk of any budget — owning him forces compromises elsewhere in your squad, and you need to be comfortable with that. And with roughly 7 in 10 managers already holding him, he's not a pick that gains you ground on the field. He's a pick that stops you *losing* ground. If he hauls and you don't own him, your rank takes a beating.

That's really the whole calculation. At this ownership level, Haaland isn't a differential decision — he's a template tax. The question isn't "is he worth it?" It's "can you afford the weeks where everyone else has him and you don't?"

My call: buy Haaland, and don't overthink the Anfield opener — the five fixtures that follow are where the points live, and selling before Liverpool only to buy back after is a hit you don't need to take. If your choice is genuinely between him and Isak, I'd want data on both before calling it a coin-flip — but a near-49-point six-week projection is a bar very few players in the game will clear. Get him in, and once the Liverpool game is out of the way, he's my captain through that run.