The Scout assesses the two most-expensive players in 2025/26 Fantasy Premier League and offers advice.
When assessing the prospects of Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (£14.5m) and Manchester City’s Erling Haaland (£14.0m), Salah’s ownership and captaincy potential is a huge factor and should not be overlooked.
Over the last few days, Salah has become the most-selected player in Fantasy, found in over 55 per cent of squads. Haaland, by contrast, is owned by only 18 per cent of managers.
This means that Salah is near-certain to be the most-popular captain in the opening few Gameweeks of the season.
If you go without Salah and he delivers a huge haul at home against AFC Bournemouth in Gameweek 1, the impact would be far more detrimental to your overall rank than if the same thing happened with Haaland.
It is, quite simply, an unnecessary risk to take at the very start of the season.
Of course, you could choose to own Salah AND Haaland. Indeed, the article below contains a squad that shows how you can afford them both. But it also underlines the fact that spending £28.5m on only two players forces you to make significant sacrifices across the rest of your squad.
Here below are two examples of squads that you could pick if you go WITHOUT Haaland.
1) Spend big in attack
By foregoing Haaland and spending big in attack, you could have Chelsea’s Cole Palmer (£10.5m), Arsenal’s Viktor Gyokeres (£9.0m) and Salah’s new team-mate at Liverpool, Florian Wirtz (£8.5m).
Palmer and Wirtz are also among the three most-owned midfielders, alongside Salah, picked by more than 51 and 35 per cent respectively.
Meanwhile, Gyokeres has quickly become the third most-popular forward, with 23 per cent ownership.
Crucially, Palmer is a great captain alternative to Salah, with Chelsea avoiding ALL of last season’s top eight teams in the first six Gameweeks.
See the Fixture Difficulty Ratings for every club
If you go without Haaland you could also pick Everton’s Iliman Ndiaye (£6.5m), who has great opening fixtures too.
Like Salah and Palmer, Ndiaye takes penalties for his club - and Gyokeres, Tottenham Hotspur’s Dominic Solanke (£7.5m) and Brighton & Hove Albion’s Danny Welbeck (£6.5m) could also emerge as their club’s new penalty-takers this season.
If you're spending so much of your budget in attack, you'll need to identify budget-friendly players with very favourable early runs of opponents.
At £4.5m, Brentford goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher, Spurs centre-back Micky van de Ven and West Ham United full-back Aaron Wan-Bissaka can offer excellent value over many Gameweeks.
This leaves Nottingham Forest’s Nikola Milenkovic (£5.5m) as the only non-budget defender in the suggested squad below. The centre-back would have placed first for points among defenders in Fantasy last season if the new defensive contribution points had been added.
2) Get a balanced squad
Alternatively, you could reinvest the Haaland funds across your entire squad and strengthen every area, reducing your reliance on the performance of cheap players.
In contrast to the squad suggested above, this second squad has two premium defenders - Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk (£6.0m) and Arsenal’s Myles Lewis-Skelly (£5.5m). You could then rotate Wan-Bissaka and Van de Ven in the third spot, picking whichever player has the better fixture in a given Gameweek.
Goalkeeper Matz Sels (£5.0m) offers a cheaper route into Nottingham Forest’s rearguard than Milenkovic ahead of the club's favourable run of opponents.
According to the Fixture Difficulty Ratings (FDR), where the difficulty of each fixture is ranked from one to five, with one being the easiest possible match and five being the hardest, Forest’s average of 2.67 over the first six Gameweeks is the joint-best of any side.
See who has the best and worst early fixtures
In midfield, Salah and Palmer are the premium players in this squad, with Ndiaye joined by Aston Villa’s Morgan Rogers (£7.0m), who is £2.0m less expensive than Villa forward Ollie Watkins (£9.0m).
Alongside Solanke up front, you could have West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen (£8.0m) and Forest’s Chris Wood (£7.5m). Both were ranked among the six top-scoring players in 2024/25 yet they only cost a combined £15.5m, just £1.5m more expensive than Haaland costs by himself.
Similarly to Solanke, they can offer fine value from the outset thanks to their kind early schedules.