Rice
VS
Bruno G.
Rice Vs Bruno G.: The Better FPL Pick
The call — Rice or Bruno Guimarães? My numbers say it's not even a conversation. Two Arsenal midfielders, same fixtures, similar price bracket — and a gulf between them. Over the next six gameweeks my projections have Rice down for around twenty-three points. Bruno Guimarães? Barely six. That's not a nuance, that's a fourfold gap, and it settles the head-to-head before we've even…
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Here's why the gap matters more than the price tags. Rice at £7.5m costs you £0.6m more than Bruno at £6.9m, and on paper the cheaper man frees up cash. But six projected points across six gameweeks is enabler territory — a return of roughly a point a game, the kind of output you'd expect from a bench body, not a £6.9m midfielder. When two players share the same shirt and the same run of games, a gap that size tells you one of them is carrying the attacking role and the other simply isn't. My model ranks Rice clearly on top, and that ranking is the whole story: he's the one in the productive slot.
Ownership backs the eye of the market too. Rice sits in roughly one or two in every ten teams — popular but not template. Bruno is owned by hardly anyone, well under one in ten, and on these numbers that's not a hidden gem, it's the crowd being right.
Now the honest caveat: this is a tough run of fixtures for Arsenal. Chelsea at the Emirates first up is no gift, and the away trips to Sunderland, Brighton and Forest are the sort of games where midfield returns dry up. Home games against Leeds and Everton are the obvious targets. Even Rice's twenty-three points is a "solid, not spectacular" haul — call it a shade under four a week, with the odd bigger score when Arsenal click at home. He's not a captaincy option in this stretch; he's a reliable starter.
But reliable beats invisible. Bruno at these numbers isn't a value pick, he's dead money — £6.9m for output you can find at £5.0m.
My call: if you're choosing between these two, buy Rice and don't look back. Bruno Guimarães is a sell if you own him and a hard avoid if you don't. Start Rice every week through this run, especially the home games against Leeds and Everton — just captain elsewhere.