After studying how Sergio Aguero (£11.4m), Raheem Sterling (£11.2m) and Harry Kane (£12.4m) have fared in 2018/19 compared to their best-ever Fantasy Premier League seasons, we now turn our attention to the most premium of premium picks: Mohamed Salah (£13.0m).
In this mini-series, we look at the key underlying statistics of some big-money assets and analyse how the figures from this campaign are matching up to their stand-out FPL seasons in the past.
For Salah, his zenith was a record-breaking, 32-goal 2017/18 in which the Egyptian racked up 303 points in FPL.
Very few Fantasy managers are expecting the Liverpool midfielder to match that haul of last season, which is, of course, a bit of an issue given that Salah’s price has rocketed up to the £13.0m mark.
Salah’s “triple-hundred” in 2017/18 came courtesy of 32 goals, 12 assists, 15 clean sheet points and 26 bonus, scored at a rate of 8.42 FPL points per match (PPM).
The former Chelsea and Roma midfielder missed only two Premier League matches altogether, with just two of his 36 top-flight appearances coming off the bench.
Salah is an ever-present this campaign, averaging 6.25 FPL points per match.
With competition for attacking places at Liverpool perhaps fiercer this season than it was in 2017/18, we can surely expect Salah to miss out on a few starts as the fixture schedule gets ever-more congested, though Jurgen Klopp has resisted the urge to rest last season’s talisman (in the league, at least) with three months of the campaign already gone.
If Salah avoids injury and goes on to make the same number of league appearances in 2018/19 as he did last year (36) while scoring at his current rate, we can expect the Egyptian to rack up somewhere in the region of 225 FPL points – although any dreaded “one-point” cameos off the bench would, of course, affect that rather crude forecast.
With so many unknown variables to take into account between now and May, it is pretty futile to make such a projection based on PPM.
Instead, we will look at Salah’s attacking KPIs from last season to see how his current underlying statistics contrast with those of 2017/18.
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5 years, 11 months agoEmphatic