Yesterday was the biggest launch day in FPL's history. The previous record was 728,000 sign-ups, and at the time of writing there's almost 1 million now.
The next article in the pre-season series is players to avoid. These are players that, in my opinion, should be left out of our drafts. Some of them initially to wait and see how they get on, some should just never see the light of day in an FPL draft.
I want to start with one player I initially had planned to include as an avoid, but they're still a "jury's out" sort of pick. Bowen is such a quality player, and annoyingly he's been reclassified as a forward 🤯, which means 1 less point per goal, and no clean sheet points anymore. So we can expect him to score fewer points, and he's gone up to £8m. It's a great GW1 fixture though, and he does offer a pivot to another £8m or under forward if he doesn't work out, so some initial thoughts on Bowen.
Getting into the avoids then, as a rule of thumb I wouldn't touch any Man City attackers besides Haaland before GW1, even new signing Cherki, who is a really exciting player. Pep has always been very untrustworthy when it comes to rotation. We've even had players bag a hat trick and benched the next match before. So Savinho, Foden, Doku, etc. are avoids. There will be times where we strongly look at these, and they're fine when in form if you're willing to accept the potential rotation, but before the season even starts it's even harder to get a read on Pep's lineups and tactics. Go for Haaland or avoid the Man City attack entirely in my opinion.
Mbeumo is a Man Utd player then. Only Salah got more points last season, and he's only £8m. In a huge 18% of teams! There are three reasons I'm avoiding him initially:
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Number 1️⃣: He was on penalties at Brentford and scored 5. Bruno is likely still on them.
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Number 2️⃣: He scored 20 goals from 12.5xG, which is a huge anomaly. Elite players overperform their xG, but not by that much consistently.
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Lastly: It's a new team, new manager, new system to adapt to. Wait and see territory.
I'd put Cunha in the same boat, but he feels likelier to replicate last season's output and didn't take a single penalty. Man Utd honestly just feel like a hard avoid besides Fernandes currently. Bruno still looks amazing and will come away with defensive contribution points quite a few times this season.