The Greatest Fantasy Premier League Bargains of All Time

You can almost smell the ink. Newspapers spread across the kitchen table, fingers smudged black, kids hunched over the small print hunting for defenders who took free-kicks and midfielders listed as strikers by mistake. You scribbled down your XI, grabbed the house phone and rang the numbers through. Fantasy football as a maths lesson, a family ritual, a summer obsession.

Before chips, wildcards and triple captains, that was the game. The thrill hasn’t changed, though. It still comes down to the same thing: finding that one player the algorithm has got badly, gloriously wrong.

A cheap defender racking up clean sheets. A midfielder masquerading as a striker. A £5m punt who ends up carrying your season.

With help from FPL expert Thomas Woods and the number-crunchers at Fantasy Football Scout, here’s a look at the true icons of the official game since it launched in 2002-03. Not just the flat-track bullies with 20 goals and a premium price tag, but the players who broke the game.

Mo Salah, of course, sits on his own throne. Eight seasons over 200 points, the only man to clear 300, and he’s done that twice. Thierry Henry, Frank Lampard, Cristiano Ronaldo – the classic monsters of the early years – all posted huge hauls but came at a cost that bent your budget out of shape.

The real magic lies elsewhere. In the bargains that let you squeeze Salah in. In the misclassifications, the one-season wonders, the cult heroes you still talk about a decade later.

Here are 10 of the greatest.

10. Harry Kane, Tottenham, 2014-15 – starting price £5.0m

It sounds absurd now. Harry Kane, future England captain and record goalscorer, slotted into the game at £5.0m. Back then, though, he was a bench option behind Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado, a kid still trying to convince successive managers he belonged at White Hart Lane.

He didn’t score a Premier League goal until November – a scruffy, deflected 90th-minute winner at Aston Villa. That late strike opened the floodgates. Kane finished with 21 league goals, nailed his place in Mauricio Pochettino’s side and turned from makeweight to must-have almost overnight.

Between gameweeks 18 and 25, he caught fire. Nine goals, four assists, 16 bonus points, 77 points in eight matches. Those who jumped early rode the wave; those who hesitated watched his price climb from £5.0m to £6.4m as their mini-leagues slipped away.

He ended on 191 points, with fewer minutes than anyone above him on the all-time value list. For one season, Harry Kane was the cheapest cheat code in town.

8. Michel Vorm, Swansea, 2011-12 – £4.0m

Michel Vorm’s Premier League debut looked like a horror show at first glance. Four goals conceded away at Manchester City. For a £4.0m goalkeeper, that felt about right.

Look again. He made 11 saves that night – more than any other keeper managed in a single game all season. That set the tone.

Swansea’s Dutch stopper swept the club’s end-of-season awards and quietly turned into an FPL phenomenon. He combined volume saves with clean sheets, 14 of them, and finished with the second-highest goalkeeper total behind Joe Hart, who had started the game a full £3m more expensive.

Vorm’s price peaked at £5.3m. At one stage he was the fourth-most owned player in the entire game. In real life and in fantasy, this was his high-water mark, a season where a £4.0m punt became a weekly security blanket.

7. Stuart Dallas, Leeds, 2020-21 – £4.5m

Under Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds were chaos. For FPL managers, Stuart Dallas turned that chaos into gold.

Listed as a defender. Playing everywhere. Often, crucially, as an attacking midfielder. At £4.5m.

Dallas hoovered up clean-sheet points while popping up in the final third, exactly the sort of positional quirk that seasoned managers dream about. He scored eight goals, chipped in with three assists and rode 12 clean sheets to a total of 171 points.

One game summed him up. Away at Manchester City, of all places, he scored twice and walked away with 17 points. An FPL defender, on paper. A box-to-box force of nature on the pitch.

For those who trusted Bielsa’s madness, Dallas was the steady heartbeat of their back line and the key that unlocked funds elsewhere.

6. Michail Antonio, West Ham, 2019-20 – £7.0m

Michail Antonio’s inclusion is about one month. One scorching, unforgettable month.

Classified as a midfielder, playing as a centre-forward, he limped through an injury-hit, pandemic-disrupted campaign. His price drifted. Many sold. The season restarted. And then Antonio exploded.

In July 2020 he played seven times and scored eight goals. The headline act came at Carrow Road, where he dismantled Norwich almost single-handedly with four goals in a 4-0 win.

That 26-point haul is the joint-highest ever for a player priced under £7.0m, level with Cole Palmer’s later heroics and just three shy of Salah’s all-time single gameweek record.

For a brief, delirious stretch, you didn’t just want Antonio. You were terrified to go without him.

5. John Lundstram, Sheffield United, 2019-20 – £4.0m

Lord Lundstram. A nickname born on message boards and group chats, and fully earned over nine months of glorious misclassification.

On paper, John Lundstram was a £4.0m defender, the kind of player you normally bury on your bench and hope never to see. In reality, he was a box-to-box midfielder in a well-drilled Sheffield United side, arriving late in the box, snapping into tackles and collecting bonus points.

He scored five goals, supplied four assists and picked up clean sheets on the way to 144 points. Gameweek 11, with two goals and a 21-point haul, became part of FPL folklore.

The numbers were strong. The impact on team structure was even greater. Being able to start a £4.0m “defender” every week freed up a fortune elsewhere. Lundstram didn’t just score points. He bent the entire game around him.

4. Riyad Mahrez, Leicester, 2015-16 – £5.5m

Riyad Mahrez’s season was so good it felt like a glitch.

Priced at £5.5m, he began Leicester’s title-winning campaign as a talented but inconsistent winger. On opening day against Sunderland, he blew that label apart with 15 points, rewarding the 5.9% of managers bold enough to start with him.

It wasn’t a one-off. Across the first six gameweeks, Mahrez hit double figures in five of them, banking 56 points in one of the greatest starts the game has seen. By week seven, more than half of all managers owned him. You didn’t get ahead of the curve with Mahrez. You just tried not to fall off it.

Jamie Vardy’s record-breaking run grabbed the headlines, but Vardy started £0.5m more expensive. Mahrez finished the season as the overall top scorer in FPL with 240 points, turning a mid-range midfield option into the engine of title-winning fantasy teams and real-life history.

3. Michu, Swansea, 2012-13 – £6.5m

Some players become numbers. Michu became a memory.

He arrived at Swansea as a relative unknown, priced at £6.5m. A few sharp-eyed managers noticed his 15 La Liga goals the previous year and took a chance. On the opening day at QPR, he scored twice. The bandwagon rolled out of the station and never really stopped.

Crucially, he was effectively a striker classified as a midfielder. By the time the season ended, Michu had 18 league goals, 190 FPL points and a £2.0m price rise to his name.

He managed just two league goals the following year and then disappeared to Napoli, but by then the legend was sealed. For one season, he was the quintessential cult hero: a budget pick who felt like family as he racked up points on your screen.

2. Mohamed Salah, Liverpool, 2024-25 – £12.5m

If there is one premium player who breaks all the rules of this list, it’s Mohamed Salah.

Liverpool have had other FPL titans. Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson redefined what full-backs could be in the game. Luis Suarez delivered 55 attacking returns in 2013-14 despite missing the first five matches and posted the third-highest score ever.

Salah still stands apart. 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 ever breach 300 points, and he has done that twice.

His 2024-25 campaign sits at the top of the mountain: a record 344 points, produced immediately after what, for him, counted as a “down” year – a total still north of 200.

He was expensive at £12.5m, yes. But he was also non-negotiable. Salah didn’t just justify the price. He redefined what a premium asset could be.

1. Cole Palmer, Chelsea, 2023-24 – £5.0m

To understand Cole Palmer’s season, you have to remember how it started.

He arrived at Chelsea from Manchester City seeking minutes, not stardom. FPL priced him at £5.0m, a budget midfielder on the fringes of an unpredictable squad. He didn’t start a league game until matchweek seven.

When he finally did, only 63,575 managers owned him – 0.6% of the game – for his first double-figure return at Burnley in gameweek eight. A 12-point haul at Tottenham in gameweek 12 nudged that ownership to 4.5%. The whispers turned into a roar.

From there, Palmer became unavoidable. By gameweek 33, more than five million managers had him in their teams when he tore Everton apart with four goals and a 26-point return, matching Antonio’s record for a sub-£7.0m player. Even then, he cost just £6.1m.

He finished the season as the overall top scorer with 244 points, officially crowned by Fantasy Football Scout as the best-value FPL player ever based on starting price. The game responded in kind: a £5.5m price rise, the biggest in FPL history, took him to £10.5m at the start of 2024-25.

From £5.0m punt to premium cornerstone in one year. From rotation risk to the most valuable asset the game has ever seen.

The ink-stained newspapers have gone. The calculators have been replaced by algorithms. But the chase is the same. Somewhere in next season’s price list, another Cole Palmer is hiding. Who spots him first?