The Best Value Players in Fantasy Premier League History
There was a time when fantasy football meant ink-stained fingers, not algorithm-driven chips. You’d sit at the kitchen table, newspaper spread out, scribbling down codes for Julian Dicks and Juninho, phoning in transfers from the house landline. Parents told themselves it was a maths lesson. Really, it was obsession.
Two decades on, Fantasy Premier League is a global machine with millions of managers and an ocean of data. But the heartbeat of the game hasn’t changed. It still comes down to the same rush: spotting the bargain before everyone else does. The mispriced forward. The defender on free-kicks. The £4.0m keeper who refuses to concede.
With help from resident FPL analyst Thomas Woods and deep dives from Fantasy Football Scout, here’s a look at the true icons of the official game era – not just the big scorers, but the players who bent the pricing model to breaking point.
Because while Thierry Henry, Frank Lampard and Cristiano Ronaldo defined early seasons, and Mohamed Salah has rewritten the record books, this list is about value. About the picks that let you stack stars elsewhere. About the names that made your mini-league rivals wince.
10. Harry Kane, Tottenham, 2014-15 – starting price £5.0m
It’s hard to imagine now, but Harry Kane once entered an FPL season as a budget punt.
In 2014-15 he was the understudy, priced at £5.0m behind Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado. He didn’t score in the league until November, nicking a 90th-minute winner off the bench at Aston Villa. That late deflection was the spark.
From there, Kane tore through the campaign. Twenty-one league goals, a permanent place in Mauricio Pochettino’s XI and an eight-game burst from gameweeks 18 to 25 that defined seasons: nine goals, four assists, 16 bonus points, 77 points in total.
Those who jumped early watched his price climb from £5.0m to £6.4m as he finished on 191 points. Less game time than anyone above him on the all-time value list, yet still 11th. The greatest “how did we all miss that?” bargain of the modern era.
8. Michel Vorm, Swansea, 2011-12 – £4.0m
Michel Vorm’s first taste of the Premier League looked like a horror show on paper: four goals conceded at Manchester City. But buried in that defeat was a clue. He made 11 saves that day, more than any keeper would manage in a single match all season.
From there, he became the template budget goalkeeper.
Vorm swept Swansea’s club awards and quietly dominated FPL. Fourteen clean sheets, save points piling up, and only Joe Hart – £3.0m more expensive at the start – finished ahead of him among keepers. His price climbed to £5.3m, and at one stage he was the fourth-most owned player in the entire game.
For one season, both on the pitch and on our screens, he was untouchable.
7. Stuart Dallas, Leeds, 2020-21 – £4.5m
Under Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds played chaos football. Stuart Dallas turned that chaos into fantasy gold.
Listed as a defender at £4.5m, he spent the season popping up everywhere but full-back. As Woods notes, he effectively operated as an attacking midfielder for long stretches in 2020-21, while still banking defensive clean sheets.
The numbers were outrageous for his price: eight goals, 12 clean sheets, three assists, 171 points. He even smashed Manchester City with a brace for 17 points, the sort of haul you expect from a premium forward, not a budget defender.
Dallas wasn’t just a bargain. He was the player that let you load up on premiums, safe in the knowledge your “cheap defender” was playing like a No 10.
6. Michail Antonio, West Ham, 2019-20 – £7.0m
Michail Antonio’s inclusion is about one month that FPL managers still talk about.
Classified as a midfielder but used as a centre-forward, his 2019-20 season stumbled through injuries and a pandemic break. His price dropped, his ownership drifted. Then football returned – and Antonio exploded.
In July 2020 he played seven times and scored eight goals. The peak came at Norwich: four goals in a 4-0 win, a 26-point haul that still sits as the joint-best return ever for a player priced under £7.0m, level with Cole Palmer and only three short of Salah’s all-time gameweek record.
It wasn’t a season-long masterpiece. It was a blistering, unforgettable run that turned him into a cult hero.
5. John Lundstram, Sheffield United, 2019-20 – £4.0m
John Lundstram broke the game.
A £4.0m defender is usually bench fodder, the player you pray never has to come on. Lundstram, misclassified by FPL, turned that convention upside down. As Woods points out, he was in reality a box-to-box midfielder, not a full-back.
He started the season as a nobody, with only five league starts the year before. He ended it as “Lord Lundstram”, a must-start asset who scored five goals, added four assists, collected clean sheets and finished on 144 points.
His two-goal, 21-point eruption in gameweek 11 became instant folklore. Just as important, his rock-bottom price allowed managers to squeeze extra stars into their squads. He wasn’t just value; he was structural advantage.
4. Riyad Mahrez, Leicester, 2015-16 – £5.5m
Leicester’s title win was a sporting miracle. In FPL terms, it was Riyad Mahrez who turned it into a gold rush.
Priced at £5.5m, he announced himself with 15 points on opening day against Sunderland, rewarding the 5.9% of managers brave enough to start with him. That wasn’t a one-off. Mahrez hit double figures in five of the first six gameweeks, racking up 56 points in that spell alone – one of the most explosive starts the game has seen.
The bandwagon became inevitable. By gameweek seven, more than half of all managers owned him. Jamie Vardy’s 15-game run of returns grabbed headlines, but he had started £0.5m more expensive.
Mahrez finished the season as FPL’s top scorer on 240 points. For a mid-priced winger in a team tipped for relegation the year before, it was fantasy perfection.
3. Michu, Swansea, 2012-13 – £6.5m
Some players feel bigger on a screen than they ever did in real life. Michu was that player.
He arrived at Swansea as a relative unknown, priced at £6.5m. A few sharp-eyed managers noticed he’d scored 15 goals in La Liga the previous season and took a punt. They were rewarded immediately: two goals at QPR on the opening day, and the bandwagon started rolling.
Classified as a midfielder but effectively playing as a striker, he finished 2012-13 with 18 league goals and 190 FPL points. His price rose by £2.0m over the campaign as he became near-essential.
Woods calls him probably the biggest one-season wonder in FPL history. It fits. He scored just twice the following year and then left for Napoli. But for one season, Michu felt like family to millions of managers.
2. Mohamed Salah, Liverpool, 2024-25 – £12.5m
You can build a list of bargains and still have to make room for royalty.
Liverpool’s flying full-backs Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson have been long-term staples. Luis Suarez once produced 55 attacking returns in 2013-14 despite missing the first five games, the third-highest FPL score ever. Yet when you talk about the game’s defining premium asset, it always comes back to Mohamed Salah.
Since FPL began, 52 players have hit 200 points in a season at least once. Salah has done it eight times. He is the only player to break 300 points, and he’s done that twice.
His 2024-25 campaign stands alone: 344 points, the highest total in the game’s history, delivered straight after what was, by his standards, a “down” season that still cleared 200. Expensive? Absolutely. But he turned that outlay into guaranteed captaincy returns week after week.
In a world of price rises and bandwagons, Salah has been the constant. The premium who actually justified every penny.
1. Cole Palmer, Chelsea, 2023-24 – £5.0m
To understand Cole Palmer’s place at the top of this list, you have to rewind to how that season started.
He left Manchester City for Chelsea in search of minutes, not headlines. FPL priced him at £5.0m, a budget midfielder in a chaotic, untrusted attack. He didn’t even start a league game until matchweek seven.
When he produced his first double-figure return at Burnley in gameweek eight, only 63,575 managers owned him – just 0.6% of the game. A 12-point haul away at Tottenham in gameweek 12 nudged that number up to 4.5%. Then the avalanche came.
By the time he scored four goals against Everton for a 26-point haul in gameweek 33, more than five million managers had him locked in. His price still sat at only £6.1m.
Fantasy Football Scout calls Palmer, based on starting price, the best-value FPL player of all time. The numbers back it up: 244 points, the top scorer in 2023-24, and a record-breaking price rise of £5.5m that left him at £10.5m for the start of 2024-25.
From low-ownership punt to the most valuable asset the game has seen, Palmer didn’t just break out – he redrew the map.
From ink-stained newspapers to live apps, the game has changed. The thrill hasn’t. Somewhere in this season’s £4.0m defenders and £5.5m midfielders, the next Lundstram or Palmer is waiting. The only question is who spots them first.
