Newcastle United
St James' Park
Newcastle United FPL: Who To Own, Captain And Avoid
The call — Newcastle: buy the attack, not the badge The sharpest thing our model says about Newcastle right now is simple: they carry one of the three best attacks in the league, and the fixture computer has just handed them Coventry away, Villa, Palace, Everton and Fulham before Arsenal finally shows up in six weeks' time. That's about as kind a runway…
What has not being with FFIQ cost you this season?
One squad, picked before a ball was kicked and run for five 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.
The defence is a different story — mid-table at best, fifteenth of twenty by our reckoning — and that's where the value question gets interesting, because the player our model likes most here is a defender. Lewis Hall at £5.3m is the pick anyway, and not for clean sheets: he's on corners and free kicks, he starts every week, and he clears the line at the attacking end that most defenders never touch. Fixtures this soft will throw some shutouts his way regardless. Roughly 2 in 10 managers have him. That should be higher.
Up top, Wissa is the team's best projected asset full stop, nailed, and sharing penalties — a forward in a top-three attack at £6.2m is exactly the price band where value lives. Barnes is the quiet one: nearly the same projection as Hall, on corners, starting every week, and owned by barely 1 in 20 managers. If you want a Newcastle attacker nobody else has, he's it.
Now the honest bit. The £5.0m defenders — Thiaw, Botman — both start, both tick the enabler box, but you're buying clean sheets from the league's fifteenth-best defence. They'll play 90 every week, which matters, but don't expect them to win you anything. Same logic rules out the keeper. Willock is nailed in name but has only started three of five, which in my book means he isn't, and Fernandez-Pardo's two starts tell you everything about the forward depth chart behind Wissa.
So the shape of the call: this club is worth buying into over the next six, but all the value sits at the front end — or in Hall, who is functionally a front-end player wearing a defender's price tag.
The call: buy Hall now if you need a defender, buy Wissa if you need a forward, and put Barnes on the list if you want the cheap one nobody owns. Leave the centre-backs and the keeper to someone more romantic than me.