Budget enablers: who actually earns their price tag

Every squad has a budget problem somewhere - three or four premium picks eat most of your £100m, and the rest of the XI has to be found from what's left without dragging the team down. The trap is picking "cheap" over "cheap and actually good." Pulling this site's own predicted-points model for available players at £5.5m or under turns up a few names worth knowing before you fill those slots on autopilot.

Goalkeepers

Kelleher (Brentford, £5.0m) tops the list on predicted points among sub-£5.5m keepers, with Verbruggen (Brighton, £4.5m) close behind and the cheapest of the bunch. Both project ahead of several keepers costing £1m more - goalkeeper is usually the easiest position to save money on without giving up much, and the numbers back that up again this year.

Defenders

Truffert (Bournemouth, £5.5m) and Thiaw (Newcastle, £5.0m) lead the value defenders, both projecting well above what their price alone would suggest. Neither is a big ownership name yet, which is exactly the point - the model isn't pricing them off reputation, it's pricing them off attacking returns, clean sheet odds, and appearance probability.

Midfielders

The cheap midfield picture is thinner than defence or goalkeeper this year - Ampadu (Leeds, £5.5m) and Groß (Brighton, £5.5m) are the standouts under £5.5m, both projecting for useful returns without being the kind of explosive differential you'd captain. Treat this tier as "solid enabler," not "secret star" - the real differentials in midfield mostly sit a price bracket higher (more on that in our captaincy piece).

Forwards

Forward is where budget picks get hardest to find, and this year is no exception - Beto and Barry, both Everton at £5.5m, are the two names the model rates highest under that price. Worth building expectations accordingly: a budget forward is there to start every week and take the occasional clean chance, not to be your third captaincy option.

The takeaway

None of this is "buy these players blindly" - it's a starting shortlist worth cross-checking against status (news, injuries, suspensions - see the badge next to any name on Players) and your own eye on pre-season minutes before the squad locks. But if you're staring at your budget slots wondering where the value actually is this season, this is where the model says to look first.

Figures pulled directly from this site's live player pool ahead of Gameweek 1 - see Players to sort and filter the full list yourself.