Teams To Avoid — The Toughest Upcoming Fixtures

Six clubs, one common problem: nobody in this group is keeping many clean sheets.

The read is blunt. Hull, Coventry, Bournemouth, Ipswich, Fulham and Sunderland all face a very unkind run for shutouts over the opening six gameweeks. Hull open with Manchester United and then get Aston Villa, Chelsea and Newcastle; Coventry draw Arsenal, Manchester City, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle. Our model rates the attacking picture for both as tough too — which means there's no compensating goal threat to bail out the cheap defenders. Ipswich, Fulham and Sunderland at least get an average look for goals, so the interest there is up the pitch, not at the back.

Where the model actually sees value is Bournemouth and Sunderland. Truffert at £5.5m tops our Bournemouth list, and even against City, Newcastle, Liverpool and Chelsea he's projected for around three points a game — attacking returns doing the heavy lifting rather than clean sheets. Only about 1 in 20 managers have him. Behind him, Kroupi Jr (£7.5m, owned by roughly 1 in 7) and Rayan (£6.5m, barely 1 in 25) land in similar territory: solid rather than spectacular most weeks, with the odd goal turning a quiet score into a big one.

Sunderland's Le Fée (£6.0m) is the pick of this whole group on our numbers — comfortably the best six-week return here, a bit over three a game, and owned by only about 1 in 15. Fulham's Iwobi at £5.5m is almost unowned and projects well, though the model prefers Leno and Robinson ahead of him for reasons of squad structure, not raw points.

The nuance: "very tough for clean sheets" isn't the same as "no points". Leno at £4.5m still projects respectably because busy keepers collect saves, and Ipswich's Davis at £4.0m is a functional bench body. That's the trap, though — Diop is already in about 2 in 10 squads at the same price with a slightly worse outlook. Popularity there is habit, not evidence.

FPL verdict. Avoid Hull and Coventry entirely — the fixtures punish both ends and neither has a player worth the slot. Watch Truffert; at £5.5m he's a fair fifth defender if you need one, but don't pay up for clean sheets that likely aren't coming. The one genuine buy is Le Fée at £6.0m: cheap, lightly owned, and the strongest scorer our projections see in this bracket.