The best budget defenders to sign in FPL – including Wolves & Crystal Palace stars…
The best cheap defenders for your Fantasy Premier League this season – including Wolves, Palace & Burnley men.
The Fantasy Premier League is back and more challenging than ever, with a slew of new rules changing the way we pick teams and score points – and no position has changed more than our defence.
The new defensive contributions rule turns centre-backs who seldom score into star picks. Last season, James Tarkowski, Nikola Milenković and Murillo would have been among the very highest scorers – and the reign of the full-back is over. For a more detailed breakdown of how the rules work and how they’ll affect strategy, check out my previous article here.
The FPL, of course, aren’t completely daft (despite the impression provided by the user interface nightmare of a new website) and they’ve upped the price of many defenders accordingly. So in a world in which Tarkowski is a £5.5m player, where do we find the budget defenders that will be crucial to our team?
I’ve taken it upon myself to write up a series of articles identifying the best budget enablers at each position and to explain my choices – midfielders and strikers are up on Sunday, but you can already read my thoughts on the best cheap goalkeepers available by clicking here.
The Crystal Palace & Wolves defenders who could be the best in the FPL at £4.5m..
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to define ‘budget-friendly’ as £4.5m or below – largely because every team will want at least two and probably three such players. Even with the uptick in points available to defenders, they will still score fewer than the best midfielders and forwards, so that’s where you want to concentrate your spending to get the most bang for your buck.
Almost every FPL draft I throw together ahead of the new season, then, will have a £4.0m defender that will mostly sit on my bench and two £4.5m defenders that I plan to rotate in and out, with a back three being my default formation. I want to keep the defence cheap and play as few as possible. Defensive contributions (DC) have re-balanced things slightly, but not by all that much.
Starting with the £4.5m defenders then, what we’re looking for are either full-backs who provide an especially large number of assists and goals or centre-backs who rack up the clearances, blocks, tackles and interceptions – as well as defenders who play for teams that keep clean sheets on a regular basis.
So what we’re looking for are under-the-radar defenders whose teams generally keep a tight ship at the back, who make a lot of clearances – often thanks to playing on teams which cede a lot of possession and play deep – and ideally who offer something in the final third.
The big DC merchants are a little easier to find, and among them are West Ham’s Max Kilman, who at £4.5m would have totalled 332 defensive contributions defensive contributions last season at an average of 8.7 per game – not quite as high or as reliable as the Everton centre-backs, for instance, but right up there.
Given that Kilman was an ever-present last season, that makes him a solid choice, but he offers no attacking threat (one assist and zero goals in 38 matches in 2024/25) so DC alone aren’t enough. We need clean sheets. West Ham didn’t keep many of them.
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