The Fantasy Premier League players to avoid at all costs - including Liverpool and Arsenal stars

Fantasy Premier League is back, and with less than a month until the season starts our resident FPL expert and top 2,000 player, Matthew Gregory, has been putting some pieces together to help you navigate the tricky process of building your team for the start of the season.

He’s already gone into detail on how to build the perfect starting squad, picked out some potential bargain buys and taken a look at how the new rules may affect FPL strategy – and now he’s here to pick out some potential traps to avoid falling into. These are players who, for differing reasons, may tempt the unwary FPL player – but who have considerable potential to fail to live up to their price tags.

William Saliba & Gabriel Magalhães

Arsenal defenders did exceptionally well last season, with the top three highest-scoring defenders all coming from the Gunners – two of which were Saliba and Gabriel, who were reliable options for 2023/24 but look like a huge trap at £6.0m this time around.

That’s partly because, at that price point, it’s hard for either to guarantee that they live up to it (take just a few clean sheets away and they score the same as much cheaper players) but also because one or both are very likely to lose their place. Jurriën Timber took Gabriel’s spot for the opening day of last season before he instantly suffered a serious ligament injury, and Mikel Arteta is in the process of negotiating over Bologna centre-half Riccardo Calafiori as well. There are simply no guarantees over Arsenal’s starting central defensive pairing this season, and if you’re spending that much on a defender you need them to be a nailed-on, guaranteed starter every week.

Cody Gakpo

Impressive form at Euro 2024 has combined with the assumption that new manager Arne Slot might play Gakpo in his best position at left wing to make the Dutchman a popular pick in early drafts, with nearly 10% of teams having him so far. Throw in some relatively gentle fixtures for Liverpool at the start of the season, and there are definitely some arguments for his inclusion.

But there are plenty against it, too. He’s been repositioned as a forward, which reduced the points he scores per goal, and he will surely rotate with players like Diogo Jota and perhaps Luis Díaz if he does play out wide. And even if he starts and continues his international form into the early domestic season, he’s never been a huge scorer – he scored eight from an xG of about nine last time around and has only reached double figures in a league season once in his career, for Feyenoord in 2021/22. Even at his best, he's unlikely to be better than decent in the long run, and he sits at the same price point as more reliable players like Jarrod Bowen.

Fabian Schär

The Newcastle United defender has been a good asset to have over the last two years, but he’s now priced at £5.5m and for that price tag you need the potential to score more than the 123 points he racked up last year – and although he’s a threat from set pieces and is liable to score a few goals every season, the stats don’t suggest that he’ll surpass last season’s mark by any real distance, if at all.

Furthermore, his club have been looking about for another defender after the free signing of Lloyd Kelly and missing out on Tosin Adarabioyo. If they do sign another centre-back, it’s more likely that the veteran Swiss international is the man to make way rather than defender Sven Botman in the long run, although the Dutchman will miss the start of the season with injury. If he was at £5.0m, he’d be a consideration – but at £5.5m, the price is just too steep.

Joshua Zirkzee

Whenever a big club signs a new striker, some people will be interested – especially at the relatively budget-friendly price of £7.0m. Not too many people are gambling on him in their first drafts, but if he fires from the start then he will look very cheap indeed.

The problem is firstly that it isn’t clear where he’ll play, given that he isn’t a true number nine and instead played behind a central striker at Bologna, and also that while he’s a fabulously creative and tricksy player, he isn’t a big goalscorer – he hit 12 in 37 games last season, which is an entirely respectable return but not the kind of numbers that get a striker close to 200 points. Likely to be rotated in and out of the line-up to start with, I’d steer clear for now.

Jordan Pickford or Vitalii Mykolenko

This is less about the individuals than about team structure. Everton’s defence was among the best in the division last year and Pickford was the highest-scoring goalkeeper, so he’s a very popular choice and full-back Mykolenko, the only Everton starting defender priced below £5.0m, looks like a great grab too.

They both are – but not together. While Everton kept a superb 13 clean sheets last year they were still a mid-table team who had some nasty patches of form, and playing both at the same time means they will live and die together, and the latter will happen a lot of the time as well. Doubling up on less reliable defences is generally a bad idea for regular points scoring, so we’d pick one and leave the other behind. Pickford is probably the better of the two for most teams, although it depends on your template. Mykolenko may well be a fine pick at £4.5m but he’s not been a huge hauler as yet.

Leon Bailey

The Jamaican winger racked up a very solid 148 points last season – a fine return for a player at the £6.5m price point, and if he does that again he’d be a fine inclusion in your team. The problem is that he probably won’t, at least judging by the stats.

Bailey overperformed his expected goals and assists last season, with 21 goal contributions against an expected 15.5, which in itself was comfortably the best performance of his career. He could keep improving, of course, but the numbers behind him to date, both at Aston Villa and in the Bundesliga, imply that he’s unlikely to be such a successful goalscorer again. It’s also easy to imagine Villa being a little weaker this season with Douglas Luiz gone and Moussa Diaby potentially following. Villa do, at least, have pretty good early-season fixtures, but I’d rather take John McGinn at £5.5m and use the extra million elsewhere.

The entire Wolves squad

This isn’t a judgement on the quality of Wolverhampton Wanderers’ squad, the job done by manager Gary O’Neil, or their prospects for the season as a whole – it’s a judgement on the absolutely hideous run of fixtures with which they will open the season.

Six of their first eight fixtures are against likely European contenders, and the two against teams likely to be in the lower half of the table are away from Molineux. And even after that, they play Crystal Palace and Brighton & Hove Albion, both of which could easily be rather good. Pedro Neto, Hwang Hee-Chan, Matheus Cunha and Rayan Aït-Nouri all have potential to be great signings down the line as they’re very competitively priced, but unless they move clubs we’d steer well clear until at least week nine.