The best budget defenders to sign in FPL - including Wolves & Crystal Palace stars

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 – and you can now read my thoughts on the best cheap goalkeepers, midfielders and forwards as well. For now, though, it’s time to go bargain hunting at the back.

The Crystal Palace & Wolves defenders who could be the best in the FPL at £4.5m

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.

Starting with the £4.5m defenders then, what we’re looking for are either full-backs who provide an especially large number of assists and goals or centre-backs who rack up the clearances, blocks, tackles and interceptions – as well as defenders who play for teams that keep clean sheets on a regular basis.

So what we’re looking for are under-the-radar defenders whose teams generally keep a tight ship at the back, who make a lot of clearances – often thanks to playing on teams which cede a lot of possession and play deep – and ideally who offer something in the final third.

The big DC merchants are a little easier to find, and among them are West Ham’s Max Kilman, who at £4.5m would have totalled 332 defensive contributions defensive contributions last season at an average of 8.7 per game – not quite as high or as reliable as the Everton centre-backs, for instance, but right up there.

Given that Kilman was an ever-present last season, that makes him a solid choice, but he offers no attacking threat (one assist and zero goals in 38 matches in 2024/25) so DC alone aren’t enough. We need clean sheets. West Ham didn’t keep many of them.

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.

Marc Guéhi managed 280 DC total last season, 11th best in the league and worth an average of 8.2 per match, and even better could well end up at Liverpool or another side who keep a lot of clean sheets. Chris Richards, his usual centre-back partner following the sale of Joachim Andersen (another £4.5m DC monster, although one who now plays for a team with a leaky defence), managed 210 DC – but played fewer games, and reached 8.8 per match on average. He could be a sneakily decent differential, as few will notice how far up he is in the standings by average rather than total DC points.

Wolves are another team I’m interested in. They managed eight total clean sheets last season, which is a little below par, but six of them came after Vitor Pereira took over after Gameweek 17, and the addition of Emmanuel Agbadou seemed to add a lot of toughness to the back line.

Toti Gomes averaged almost exactly eight DC a game last season (decent but not earth-shattering) but while Agbadou isn’t on many lists because he only totalled 151 DC last season, that was at a massive average of 9.4, up there with the very best. Agbadou may be my pick for the best defensive sleeper in the game and if you believe that Wolves will continue their upward progress, then he looks like a very good horse to back.

As for full-backs who might be big on the attacking side of the game… Well, I’m open to suggestions. Frankly, the full-backs who really do rack up the goals and assists are appropriately priced. There’s a hype train growing around new Brighton signing Maxim De Cuyper who had excellent underlying numbers in Belgium last season, but he’s hardly a nailed-on starter. Remember Valentín Barco last season? Let’s not all make the same mistake twice. At the £4.5m price point, it’s only really centre-halves on my radar right now.

Burnley boys among the best £4.0m enablers

There are plenty of players who believe the best way to pick a £4.0m defender, a budget necessity for every well-constructed team, is to find a player who’s been sold or let go on loan, because they are the only ones whose prices can’t go down over time. Personally, I firmly believe in going for the upside and trying to find players who will score points, go up in value and provide you with a player you really can pick in a pinch.

Clearly, there aren’t many enticing options. One can gamble on a player Alex Moreno breaking into Aston Villa’s first team or maybe Pedro Lima getting a starting spot with Wolves, but the betting doesn’t look all that good as it stands – so I’m probably picking a cheap defender from a newly-promoted side who will play and who might just work out.

All three of the teams coming up had pretty good defences at second-tier level, but Burnley’s was historically impressive. They earned an astonishing 30 clean sheets in 46 games and while it’s fair to assume they won’t keep that percentage up, they’re so well-drilled at the back that they could push for double figures.

That gives Maxime Estève, a nailed-on starter if he stays (Spurs have been linked) a lot of upside at £4.0m, and the same may be true of his defensive partner, although we don’t know who that will be for sure yet. Estève isn’t much of set piece threat, sadly, but his 8.2 DC per match in the Championship is good for a team who were in control of most of their matches. Under more pressure in the Premier League, those numbers should soar.

The Frenchman has been in every draft I’ve put together so far and once we know who will partner him in defence I’d be tempted to gamble on a double £4.0m Burnley defence to free up funds further forward – although tough early fixtures will likely dissuade me from gambling that hard.

Sunderland had a pretty decent defence too, and you can make an upside case for some of their defenders like full-back Dennis Cirkin, but history suggests that teams coming up from the play-offs can get beaten up quite badly. Joe Rodon from Leeds is another consideration but his starting spot isn’t nailed on with new arrivals. Jaka Bijol, a new arrival, probably will start and could be a good DC hit, but I’m not backing Leeds to keep all that many clean sheets until proven wrong.

Transfers and clarity on likely starters may well change my mind, but for now my draft template has Estève, Agbadou and Guéhi in it – a great combination of reliability and high upside, in my opinion, and it’s an opinion that the stats seem to back up. Besides, having all three will help me afford Jeremie Frimpong, Florian Wirtz and Mohammed Salah in the same team…