The best budget defenders to sign in FPL – including Wolves & Crystal Palace stars
The best cheap defenders for your Fantasy Premier League this season – including Wolves, Palace & Burnley men
The Fantasy Premier League is back and more challenging than ever, with a slew of new rules changing the way we pick teams and score points – and no position has changed more than our defence.
The new defensive contributions rule turns centre-backs who seldom score into star picks. Last season, James Tarkowski, Nikola Milenković and Murillo would have been among the very highest scorers – and the reign of the full-back is over. For a more detailed breakdown of how the rules work and how they’ll affect strategy, check out my previous article here.
The FPL, of course, aren’t completely daft (despite the impression provided by the user interface nightmare of a new website) and they’ve upped the price of many defenders accordingly. So in a world in which Tarkowski is a £5.5m player, where do we find the budget defenders that will be crucial to our team?
I’ve taken it upon myself to write up a series of articles identifying the best budget enablers at each position and to explain my choices – midfielders and strikers are up on Sunday, but you can already read my thoughts on the best cheap goalkeepers available by clicking here.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to define ‘budget-friendly’ as £4.5m or below – largely because every team will want at least two and probably three such players. Even with the uptick in points available to defenders, they will still score fewer than the best midfielders and forwards, so that’s where you want to concentrate your spending to get the most bang for your buck.
Almost every FPL draft I throw together ahead of the new season, then, will have a £4.0m defender that will mostly sit on my bench and two £4.5m defenders that I plan to rotate in and out, with a back three being my default formation. I want to keep the defence cheap and play as few as possible. Defensive contributions (DC) have re-balanced things slightly, but not by all that much.
The Hammers managed just seven all last season, better than only five Premier League teams, and they’d need to improve dramatically at the back for Kilman to offer significant returns. Maybe they will, but I’d want to see evidence for it before I sign one of their centre-backs, even if his DC work is impressive.
That means I’m looking at a couple of other teams with cheaper centre-back options instead – Crystal Palace and Wolves, with the former being a relatively safe bet for consistent points given that they managed 11 clean sheets last season. Only six teams managed more.
