The Premium Tier Is Gone. Spend Accordingly.

The top of this season's price list is strangely quiet. Exactly two players cost £10.0m or more: Haaland at £15.5m and Bruno Fernandes at £12.0m. Widen the net to £9.0m and you still only add Saka and Palmer at £9.5m and Isak at £9.0m. Five players. That is the entire premium tier of the 2026-27 game. For years the wildcard draft started with an agonised debate about which three premiums to build around. This year the debate barely exists, and the money you are not forced to spend at the top has to go somewhere.

Where it goes is the £7.0m to £8.5m band, and that band is stacked to an almost absurd degree. Semenyo at £8.5m for Man City. Watkins down £1.0m to £8.0m. Mbeumo and Cunha both £8.0m at United, at 13.6% and 15.2% ownership. João Pedro held at £7.5m despite 177 points last season, with Rogers and Wirtz alongside him at the same price. Foden at £7.0m is his cheapest since 2020/21, and Szoboszlai sits there too, 48.2% owned and possibly inheriting Liverpool's penalties. In the old pricing world you picked one or two of these as your value plays. In this one you are picking four or five, and the combinations you choose will do more to separate your rank than anything you spend above £9.0m. The mid-band is where this season's drafts will be won, so give it the attention the premium debate used to get.

Which brings us to the quiet outlier: Isak. A £9.0m Liverpool forward, down £1.5m from last season, owned by just 11.5% of managers. Here is a forward with premium pedigree carrying a mid-tier price, in a Liverpool side that warmed up by putting four past Sunderland. And because the pricing never forces anyone to fund him, hardly anyone has. If he starts like a Liverpool number nine should, he is the single pick most capable of defining a rank by October.

So structure your draft around the new maths. Do not pay for what the game is giving away: Raya at £6.0m is the most-owned keeper at 30.4%, and eight starting goalkeepers cost under £5.0m. Bank those savings, load the £7.0m to £8.5m band with conviction rather than one token pick, and seriously consider making Isak your third big spend instead of a name the crowd already owns. Get your squad ready on FPL Guru and stress-test the structure before the 21 August deadline.

What Chelsea paid Aston Villa for Morgan Rogers this summer, a club-record fee. He has yet to play a competitive minute for his new side, and 32.1% of FPL managers have already drafted him at £7.5m, among the biggest early ownerships in the game and built entirely on faith. The remaining pre-season friendlies are your only look at his Chelsea role before the 21 August deadline. Watch who starts and who plays the full hour, not the scorelines.

The season is three weeks away, but the puzzles never stop. In today's Who Played With?, your first clue: our mystery player shared a dressing room with Ronaldinho at AC Milan in 2008. Over in Career Path, today's career starts at non-league Hednesford Town in 2001, and ends somewhere much shinier. Six clues each, one puzzle a day, streaks on the line. Play Who Played With? and Career Path on FPL Guru.