Mo Salah or No Salah?

In the first of a series of articles leading up to the revealing and finalization of my FPL team, we will discuss a hot topic among many managers, to Mo Salah or not.

As we begin tinkering with our teams for the new season, one of the first names that come to any FPL manager’s mind would be whether last season’s top points scorer Mo Salah would make it to our teams. If he were to come in at 9m as he did last year, it would be a no-brainer, but is he worth 13m? Let’s dive into what he accomplished last year.

Salah scored a whopping 303 points, which surpassed the previous high of 295 points set by Luis Suarez in the 2013/14 season. That total surpassed Frank Lampard’s heroic 284 in 2009/10 and Cristiano Ronaldo’s 283 in 2007/08 as well for midfielders. The question is, was he just very lucky or was he really that good? From my model, his projected expected points total for last season was 285, which indicates just a 6% over-performance. A points total of 285 would make anyone likely to be the highest point scorer in any season.

Option Sadio Mane?

Priced at just 9.5, that’s 3.5m you can save from going Mane instead of Salah. I believe many managers out there have looked at this possibility as a alternative way to ‘cover’ Liverpool’s free-flowing attack. Mane garnered just 147 last season which is slightly less than half of what Salah scored. But was he necessarily that bad? My model says he was very unlucky and ran 18% below his expected score of 183. Comparing their expected total points for the season, 183/285= 64.2%, you would expect Mane to score roughly 2/3 Salah’s point throughout the course of the season if nothing changes significantly this year.

Verdict

While I personally consider Mane a great option as well, he cost 73% of what Salah would yielding just 2 expected points for every 3 Salah scores, I would be a brave man to avoid making room in my team for Salah. Coupled with the fact that Salah will be captained on most weeks, it would make having him in the team a no brainer for me. So there we go, Mo Salah straight into my Gameweek 1 team!

 

As always, feel free to leave a comment or contact/follow me on Twitter @jonathantwj90 if you wish to discuss anything or have any queries. I hope to hear from you all!