Salah or Haaland? Saka or Palmer? How to make the biggest FPL decisions this season

A brand new season is almost upon us – and we’ve got just one more week before we press ‘submit’ on our Fantasy Premier League teams and get ready for another long campaign.

As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, I’ve been doing my best to help players make the right calls in the run-up to the big kick-off, and there’s a list of my (hopefully useful) articles so far below – and today, I’m taking a look at some of the biggest individual decisions that managers are going to have to make before they select their starting squad.

Should you splash out on Mohamed Salah or Erling Haaland? Will Bukayo Saka outscore Cole Palmer? Do you pick the shiny new toy in Viktor Gyökeres or the proven asset in Ollie Watkins? All that coming up…

- Best budget FPL goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards

- Seven trap players to swerve

- Three teams whose players you should target

- Three teams whose players you should avoid

Mohamed Salah v Erling Haaland

Last season, there was every reason to believe that Haaland was the ‘super premium’ player to sign going in, but it soon proved to be the case that Salah was the only choice – the Liverpool man racked up a record-breaking 344 points, while Haaland barely made the top five forwards.

But that doesn’t mean it will be the same story this time around. Manchester City are in the middle of a medium-sized rebuild but showed signs of life towards the end of the season and it would hardly be a shock if Haaland started racking up the goals again. Salah, meanwhile, isn’t getting any younger and has to start tailing off eventually, and did score rather fewer points as the campaign wore on.

The pair are, again, the most expensive players in the game, but even though Salah is a little more expensive - £14.5m compared to £14.0m – I’m heavily leaning towards signing him and leaving Haaland alone, and not only because I trust Liverpool a little more as a team right now.

The key point of difference for me is the ceiling on the return on investment. Both, at their very best, have been worth around 100 more points that a ‘normal’ top level player at their position, but the cost gap between them and the next best at their respective positions is very different. Salah costs £4.0m more than a Palmer or a Saka, while Haaland is a massive £6.5m more than, say, Chris Wood or Dominic Solanke. If you have to toss a coin on which will blow the roof of the points scoring charts, then Salah is actually a cheaper bet and safer from a financial perspective.

That, incidentally, is also why I’m not considering Alexander Isak right now. Even ignoring the potential impact on his form and morale of the Liverpool transfer saga, you’re paying £3.0m more for Isak compared to Wood when the former was only worth 20 points more last season. That’s just an overpay, and you can get more points than that by upgrading in other positions.

There’s also just the simple fact that Haaland only really blew the competition away in his first year. He was very good in year two, and merely decent last year. Salah has consistently been one of the highest scorers in the game and even if he doesn’t repeat his 300-plus heroics, not only is his ceiling higher than Haaland’s but his floor is likely higher too. This is an easy week one decision for me. Salah in, Haaland out, and if I’m proven wrong then I’ll be ready with the transfers.

In a perfect world, of course, you’d have both. Maybe there are enough genuinely free-scoring budget enablers to make that happen, but it’s likely that you’d be giving up too much. I think starting with both requires far too many correct guesses to be an option for week one, but as the best budget players make themselves known, perhaps it can be done. Perhaps.

Bukayo Saka v Cole Palmer

The battle of the semi-premium players here – Palmer comes in at £10.5m and Saka at £10.0m, and much like with Salah and Haaland, fitting both into your team is probably too much of a stretch unless you ignore the top-end premium players altogether. So which of these two reliable haulers should is the best choice?

Palmer managed 214 points last season, making him the third best midfielder in the game, while injury limited Saka to 127 points. Take his average return and stretch it out over 37 matches (the number Palmer played), however, and it’s rather closer. Saka would have been worth 188 points under those circumstances, and he passed 200 in both of the previous two seasons with a best of 226.

The ceiling for both players is very close, and normally that means going for the cheaper option – but I’m leaning towards Palmer for two reasons, the first of which is fixture difficulty. Arsenal have a pretty tricky start to the season, playing Liverpool and both Manchester clubs in the first five games, while Chelsea’s is considerably easier. Starting Palmer is more likely to produce returns, and when the fixture difficulty flips, we can move across to Saka instead if we like.

The second reason is that the arrival of Noni Madueke, the emergence of Ethan Nwaneri and the fact that Saka got injured after having played himself into the ground before suggests that he will be rotated much more often this coming season. He’ll get the lion’s share of minutes, of course, but is likely to be coming off on the hour or rest for a game here and there rather more often, dropping his ceiling a little.

Palmer, furthermore, is his team’s penalty taker and found a rich vein of form in the Club World Cup – when you consider that his 214 points came despite a much-discussed barren patch through the spring, too, it’s possible that his ceiling is closer to 250 points if he maintains form over the course of the season. I’m buying high on Palmer and while I love having Saka in my team, I think it’s much harder to justify him than his England team-mate.

Viktor Gyökeres v Ollie Watkins

Some team structures, especially those which intend to start with three strikers, won’t make room for a £9.0m forward, but both Watkins and Gyökeres will be in plenty of teams – and it’s fair to assume that Arsenal’s new signing will have an extremely high ceiling based on his scoring exploits in Portugal.

The Swede scored a frankly ridiculous 39 goals in 33 league appearances last season and bagged six in eight games in the Champions League too, suggesting that the step up to Premier League level is unlikely to slow him down too much. He could easily be in the Haaland bracket and an immediate must-include for FPL teams at £9.0m.

But there’s still a strong case for starting with Watkins. Villa have one of the gentlest sets of early fixtures, he’s nailed for minutes when Gyökeres may end up being eased in slightly, and is coming off two big seasons in a row. Watkins, when on form, is barely behind a Haaland anyway, so I’d argue that he’s a safer bet to reach his peak scoring form early doors.

I still can’t blame anyone for starting with Gyökeres and if he does start strong, it’s worth keeping an eye on his price – a hype train could see his price sky rocket quickly, and you’ll want to get in ahead of that. That’s perhaps the best argument for picking him week one, and I don’t fault anyone for doing so, but I think as it stands that I’m going with Watkins. I want to make sure I get the best chance of points on the board early, but I suspect that I’ll be signing Gyökeres before too long.