In this year’s Fantasy Premier League (FPL), every penny counts. There are an abundance of premium midfielders (Salah, De Bruyne, Aubameyang) that we would all love in our team. However, fit them in, we have to make sacrifices elsewhere. After much tinkering, I’ve discovered, one place this can be done, is in the goalkeeper position.
Among the FPL community, there is a term called an ‘enabler’. An enabler is a cheap option, usually at the very bottom of his position’s price range, which you can put in your team to free up funds to use elsewhere. This article explains how you can use this to your advantage by capitalising on cheap goalkeepers which score a lot of points.
The difference between premium and budget goalkeepers
I like to refer to premium goalkeepers (£5.5m+) as clean sheet goal keepers and budget goalkeepers as (£4.0m-£5.0m) shot stoppers.
The reason being, premium goalkeepers tend to play for the top teams and face only a few shots per match, meaning they concede less goals and pick up the majority of their points from the +4 clean sheet bonuses.
Their cheaper counterparts, the cheap goalkeepers, may concede more goals over the course of a season, but they pick up points for making saves (+1 for every 3 saves) and bonus points ( up to +3). They can both also earn penalty save points (+5 per penalty save). Obviously they are likely to make more saves if their team isn’t dominating the game. Also, if the rest of their team’s players have a poor game and fail to score etc, the goalkeeper is more likely to pick up the bonus points. This is much more likely for mid-table/lower teams who lost more matches.
Each season, the difference between the number 1 and number 10 goalkeeper in FPL is less than 50 points. This is tighter than any other position in the game.
Clean Sheet Goalkeepers
If we look at some examples of clean sheet, usually premium, goalkeepers, we can start with Manchester City’s Ederson.
In the 2018/19 Premier League season, Ederson kept 20 clean sheets and finished as the second highest scoring goalkeeper in FPL. In the season after, the 2019/20 season (last season), he claimed the golden glove with 16 clean sheets. Despite keeping the most clean sheets, he was only the 9th highest scoring goalkeeper. This was due to his lack of saves points and bonus points, as mentioned above.
This stat shows, if we’re looking at getting a clean sheet goalkeeper, he needs to get around 18 clean sheets in a season for it to be worthwhile. The obvious benefit of this is he doesn’t usually have to be rotated as he’ll have a chance of picking up a clean sheet in almost every match. This is known as set and forget. He can be paired with a £4.0m gk, who will sit on your bench and it doesn’t really matter whether they play or not, as they will only likely be featured in one game week a season, when you use your bench boost.
Too add to this, there is a historical benchmark for goalkeepers to reach the number 1 spot and that is 10 clean sheets. No goalkeeper has finished the season in number 1 with less than 10 clean sheets, which, from 38 matches, is not too much of an ask.
Shot stopper goalkeepers
Shop stopper goal keepers are what I refer to as goal keepers who earn lots of saves points. These tend to be cheaper as they play for teams expected to finish lower in the table and concede more goals.
A perfect example of a shot stopping goal keeper is Tom Heaton. He became a top goalkeeper in the 2016/17 season while only keeping 10 clean sheets. However, he made 142 saves. Now 1 point for every 3 saves in a match starts to add up when you’re talking about this many saves.
At this time, he played for Burnley who scored just 39 goals in 38 games. Therefore, he was the best Burnley player in many matches, which led to him picking up a great deal of bonus points also. Burnley are a great team to choose goalkeepers from as they are known for having a great defence and not scoring too many goals. This is shown and Nick Pope was the highest scoring goalkeeper last season, although his impressive 15 clean sheets also helped a lot with this.
Which goalkeeper should I pick this season?
If you take into consideration everything mentioned above, my recommendation would be to go with two shot stopper type goal keepers that you can rotate throughout the season. This way you can save your money for some big hitters elsewhere.
It pays off more to try your luck in finding two (or even just one) goalkeepers that are cheap and you can rely on to pick up save and bonus points with, rather than going down the clean sheet route. Until very recently, when I started taking FPL a little more seriously, I was only looking for goalkeepers with good clean sheet potential. And many still do. This is why the clean sheet goalkeepers are priced so high.
Bonus Recommendation
Since you have read this far, I have a great combination of goalkeepers for you, that you can use for the first 9 game weeks at least. I will definitely be starting with these two in my team. They are Southampton’s Alex McCarthy and Brighton’s Matt Ryan. Both priced at £4.5m, when rotated correctly, their first 9 matches look like this:
- Crystal Palace
- Newcastle United
- Burnley
- West Brom
- Crystal Palace
- West Brom
- Aston Villa
- Newcastle United
- Aston Villa
This should hopefully get you started for the season and you can be on your way to finding the next budget #1 goalkeeper in FPL.