Here’s our fantasy premier league defender tips GW22 article where we give our defender and GK player rankings for gameweek 22. There’s a comprehensive table of stats and player suggestions to help you make a transfer choice.
fantasy premier league defender tips GW22 – player rankings for Defs and Gks
There’s player transfer suggestions at the end if you want to skip all the stats preamble.
Stats definitions:
I’ve firstly ordered the teams by what I think is their defensive strength based their goals, clean sheets and xG/shots conceded. You can see team defence and player xG in our cumulative underlying stats article
The stats after that are their:
fixture ease ranking so you can see who has the best fixtures to the end of the season. The first figure is GW22-27, the 2nd GW22-24. See our fixture ease article
best cheap secure gametime option and an attacking option so you can compare price.
GK price in as a comparison.
bookies odds for a clean sheet for GW22. The lower the better obviously.
Prices are as of Monday 7 January
Gameweek 22 Fixtures
The Schedule
If you want access to copy and paste the schedule here’s the google spreadsheet link which I’ve set out differently if you want to sort different columns
Player Suggestions for GW22
Liverpool, Chelsea and Man City standout as the 3 best defences statistically. Man City seem unable to convert that into clean sheets.
Liverpool
For me Alexander Arnold represents the best value for money in the Liverpool defence although Van Dijk and Robertson may give more gametime security. Hopefully being knocked out of the cup will reduce the amount of rotation
Brighton (A)
Crystal Palace (H)
Leicester (H)
West Ham (A)
Bournemouth (H)
Man Utd (A)
Chelsea
There’s no cheap option in the Chelsea defence and the difference between Luiz at £5.9m and Alonso at £6.8m has narrowed to £0.9m for his attacking potential.
Newcastle (H)
Arsenal (A)
Bournemouth (A)
Huddersfield (H)
Man City (A)
Brighton (H)
Man City
Man City still have good overall defensive stats apart from the all important stat of clean sheets. The problem is that the stats are now going through a tricky period themselves. 5 of the last 7 games have seen an xG conceded greater than 1 with an average xG conceded of 1.16. That compares poorly with their overall season average of 0.82.
The problem with Mendy injured is that your only relatively gametime secure option is Laporte who has little attacking potential and isn’t getting clean sheets either.
This conundrum has got too much for virtually all FPL managers. If you were still looking to bet that things will turnaround but want less outlay you could gamble on the cheaper John Stones at £5.2m and just suck up the rotation.
Wolves (H)
Huddersfield (A)
Newcastle (A)
Arsenal (H)
Chelsea (H)
Everton (A)
Crystal Palace
Palace, with 8 clean sheets, are top of the clean sheet race for the non top 6 sides and Wan Bissaka is still exceptional value at £4.4m. He’s the top points scoring defender for his price and only 4 other defenders have more bonus points than him the cheapest of which is £5.3m.
Van Aanholt is the attacking option but is far more expensive at £5.4m
Watford (H)
Liverpool (A)
Southampton (A)
Fulham (H)
West Ham (H)
Leicester (A)
Everton
Everton are definitely a work in progress defensively. It’s worth noting that the 4 games when CDM Gueye hasn’t played they conceded 11 goals and although 2 of those games were Spurs and Man City he seems crucial to their defensive structure.
Digne has set pieces and excellent attacking potential. He’s 5th in my underlying attacking stats for defenders schedule.
Despite some misgivings about the quality of the defence the fixtures and Digne’s attacking potential may make it worth rolling the dice
Bournemouth (H)
Southampton (A)
Huddersfield (A)
Wolves (H)
Watford (A)
Man City (H)
Overall fixtures
Here’s the next 6 fixtures taken from the official FPL site fixture difficulty ranking
There’s also our 10 top FPL managers article
If you want to see any players underlying stats see our cumulative season article and also our GW21 only underlying stats review
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