The best budget goalkeepers to sign in FPL - including Wolves & Bournemouth stoppers

The Fantasy Premier League is back with a host of changes and some brand new rules which upend the way we build our squads – and picking a starting squad is harder than ever.

As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, it’s my job to offer some advice to help you figure out the right players to sign before the season starts in just a few short weeks – so this is the first in a series of articles dedicated to highlighting some of the best budget-friendly buys at each position so you can pick out the players you need to afford all those expensive Salahs and Haalands.

I’m kicking things off by looking at the goalkeepers - and you can now read my guides to defenders, midfielders and forwards too. As a relatively low-scoring position, goalkeeper is usually where you want to keep it budget-conscious, and starting with a £4.5m goalkeeper and a £4.0m back-up is generally the best way to go. That may change as the season goes on if there are plenty of cheap and high-scoring outfield players you can buy to allow more spending at the back, but I never advocate for spending heavily in net from the word go.

This year, however, FPL have made it a little trickier than usual and there are only six goalkeepers in the game who are priced at £4.5m or below who are likely to start for their sides this season – Anthony Patterson, Caoimhín Kelleher, José Sá, Djordje Petrović, Alphonse Aréola and Bart Verbruggen. So which should we start between the sticks?

Why Bournemouth’s Djordje Petrović might end up as the best £4.5m goalkeeper in FPL

Let’s start with the headline – based on the stats, Bournemouth’s new number one Petrović is probably the best starting £4.5m goalkeeper in the league, but that comes with a colossal caveat, which is that Bournemouth’s defence will look very different next season and there’s no guarantee that it will be especially effective without Dean Huijsen, Milos Kerkez and perhaps Ilia Zabarnyi.

Before we get to that, however, let’s figure out how I arrived at the conclusion in the first place – and it starts by making sure I’m picking a player who plays 90 minutes week in, week out.

As it stands, only four of the goalkeepers mentioned above fit that description. Aréola will probably be West Ham United’s first choice heading into the new campaign, but he lost his place part way through last season and while he won it back, his place is far from assured. Meanwhile Wolves’ number one, Sá, has been linked with a transfer away. That hasn’t happened yet, but I don’t want to gamble on a player who may or may not even be at his club come the start of the season.

In short, I don’t want to have to burn a free transfer on my goalkeeper, ideally ever, and that’s also why I’m not factoring in fixture difficulty. With other positions, it’s perfectly valid to sign the player you think will be best for the first five or six games while planning to get rid of them later on. With goalkeepers, you want to set and forget whenever possible.

Many readers may have noticed that I’ve excluded Leeds United’s Illan Meslier from these calculations, and that’s for the same reason – the club are actively trying to replace him. Perhaps he does somehow end up starting again come September, but it’s not likely, so I won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.

That leaves me really only considering four goalkeepers, but for the sake of a stats comparison, the table below shows where all six stand in regards to how many points they managed per match last season, their saves per game and how often their team kept clean sheets (which factors the defence in as well, so you don’t keep Kelleher’s inflated numbers from playing for Liverpool for instance).

There are some more caveats to chew on, of course. Neither Patterson nor Petrović were in the Premier League last season, and while Sunderland’s defence was pretty decent in the second tier (fourth best, conceding 44 goals in 46 games), it’s reasonable to assume a hefty drop-off after promotion. Petrović, for his part, was exceptional for Strasbourg in France.

To make it fairer on Sá, I’ve only pulled his stats from the Vitor Pereira era, when Wolves improved dramatically after a dire start to the season. That highlights that not only is he playing for the team which had the best defence of any team with a £4.5m starting goalkeeper, but that he is up there with Kelleher for point-scoring too.

In fact, if you adjust Kelleher’s points per match to factor in Brentford’s clean sheet ratio rather than the ratio that he actually managed at Liverpool, he would be expect to drop to around 3.7 points per 90 minutes – below Sá.

In short, the stats are very clear that Sá is the best £4.5m goalkeeper as it stands. Wolves kept the most clean sheets of any team once Pereira came in (and improved their defence as the season wore on), and he racked up the most points. The problem is simply that there’s no guarantee that he’s the first-choice goalkeeper for Wolves, unless media reports are way wide of the mark.

In second place, I think the stats point to Petrović over Kelleher. Bournemouth kept more clean sheets and while they face a challenging season after a summer clear-out, Brentford are also losing key players and, more importantly, lost a very good manager. It’s unclear that they will be anywhere near as good next season, and I consider Brentford assets to be huge gambles right now. If you believe in Keith Andrews, however, then Kelleher is absolutely a defensible selection. This is where stats meet opinion, and Petrović and Kelleher are close.

Petrović, for his part, made a ton of saves, performed brilliantly, and is coming in to a well-managed side who kept clean sheets slightly more often than Brentford last season, and right now I’m giving him the nod. You can make a case for Patterson based on the stats, but given the gap between Premier League and Championship, I’m not going near him. There’s every chance that Sunderland get hammered every week, just like poor old Southampton.

Verbruggen and Aréola simply aren’t considerations for me, not just because of potential selection queries but because their teams’ defences would have to improve dramatically for either to pick up enough clean sheets. Until I see evidence of that happening, I’m just not interested.

So my conclusion is that the best goalkeeper is Petrović until we know who Wolves’ number one is for certain. If it becomes clear by the start of the season that Sá is staying, or that they have bought another goalkeeper and he also happens to be priced at £4.5m, I’m buying them. Otherwise, I’m ready to roll the dice on Petrović.

Few options at £4.0m – but Newcastle man perhaps offers best value

We also need to find a £4.0m back-up option and, as usual, there just aren’t any starters available. But we can still pick a player who might just do something useful if the cards fall the right way.

There are two goalkeepers who seem significantly more likely to get minutes with the situation as it stands – Leeds’ Karl Darlow, who took over from Meslier for seven matches in the second tier last season, and Newcastle’s Martin Dúbravka, who deputised effectively for the injured Nick Pope.

Pope may well be leaving Newcastle and certainly isn’t a nailed-on number one any more. There’s a world in which their bid for James Trafford (annoyingly well-priced at £5.0m) collapses and Dúbravka has a chance of being the starting goalkeeper. Likely? No. Possible? Yes. Just about.

Leeds, for their part, will surely sign a new goalkeeper at some point but if they fail to do so before the season gets underway then they may well hand the gloves to the experienced Darlow over Meslier, even if the Frenchman is still around. It’s been made pretty clear that Meslier is free to leave, and having him start would represent an awkward backslide.

READ MORE: How the new defensive contribution rules make stars of Everton centre-backs

It’s probable that no £4.0m goalkeeper gets significant minutes, of course, but given that we never expect to play our back-up ‘keeper anyway, it doesn’t really matter save for when we use our bench boosts, which we should be carefully tying in to our wildcards anyway. In short, I firmly believe in the method of setting and forgetting a £4.5m goalkeeper and taking a £4.0m back-up who has some hypothetical chance of being involved down the line. I’ll cheerfully take either Darlow or Dúbravka depending on whose circumstances look more favourable at the time.

I know many players aim for two £4.5m goalkeepers and plan to rotate them – to me, that £0.5m extra is always better spent in midfield or up front. There are just so many more points available further up the pitch that I strongly believe in focusing on spending as much money there as humanly possible. The return on investment is just better. That’s why I never start with a £5.0m goalkeeper, and certainly never anyone more expensive.

If the way my team construction changes over the season means that bringing a more expensive goalkeeper happens to be good down the line, great. But from Gameweek One I’ll be on either Petrović or Sá and be very happy with it.