Mean Reversion Machine – GW17: Have your Phil?

None of our recent travails this week trying to draw parallels between the worlds of investment and fantasy football, given both are currently suffering from severe bouts of FOMO. If you want a more learned prescription on balancing the clear opportunities of AI versus the equally clear dangers of the inflated valuations to be found in the sector, it would be kinder to direct you to Stuart Gray’s Picks for ’26 analysis here.

If, however, you are after some gentle musings on whether the quartet of players about whom the wider FPL market is currently obsessing – Bruno Fernandes, Phil Foden, Hugo Ekitiké and, perhaps more left-field in all but his position, Fulham’s Harry Wilson – represent a reasonable expectation of future returns or a gaze firmly fixed on the rearview mirror, you are in the right place. Or, at least, as good a place as any.

The four are top of our Herdwatch table for transfers-in over the last week – with Wilson way out in front due to his budget-friendly price-tag of £5.6m (at least as I type). Still, points-wise, he has more than held his own of late with the other three: Manchester United lynchpin and FPL royalty Bruno; Manchester City midfielder Foden, now firmly back in the points after a shaky season and a quarter; and new Liverpool striker Ekitiké.

Over the last four gameweeks, Wilson has scored 42 points (most recently16, then 8, 8 and 10); the £8.6m Ekitiké has 28 (13, 13, 1 and 1); the £9.3m Fernandes has 46 (13, 18, 4 and 11); and the £8.8m Foden has an extraordinary 55 (11, 12, 17 and 15). For what it is worth, on the points per million (PPM) metric, that works out respectively as 3.2 for Ekitiké, 4.9 for Bruno, 6.25 for Foden and just the 7.5 for Wilson.

I do not think I am being terribly unkind in suggesting the wider market may have at least partly had its head turned by all these past points. The more interesting question for us more discerning souls, however, is who should be attracting our attention going forward. Is it Ekitiké, who is now facing less competition among Liverpool attackers and has some nice fixtures coming up but does seem to have a few fitness concerns?

Or is it Bruno, who pulls the strings for his team, and has ‘all the routes to points’ (© all FPL pundits) but may miss the likes of Mbeumo and Amad who have now departed for Afcon? Or Wilson, who is clearly in the form of his life but would appear to be running out of decent fixtures? Or Foden, who is either making up for lost time or, alongside Wilson, waging a two-man war against everything this column stands for?

If you had to bet on the player most likely to improve on their PPM metric above over the next four gameweeks, it would surely be that same order of Ekitiké, Bruno, Foden and Wilson. Equally, it seems probable that, for many FPL players, Wilson is being used as a makeweight to upgrade a striker spot to Ekitiké – and, if such a trend holds, it may not be long before we see one or both in the MeanReversionMachine index.

After last week’s free hit, that now shapes up as the lefthand chart below, with the aforementioned Foden and Bruno replacing Mbeumo and Caicedo, Thiago coming in for Joao Pedro and the whole extravagance funded by the return of Marc Guiu for Mateta. A perfect mirror of the most owned players would require Virgil in for Senesi but the portfolio finds itself £0.1m short for that, which is just how FPL rolls sometimes.

As for the one-off chart, below right, that is offered as a morsel of hope for anyone who, like me, has no route to Ekitiké or indeed Wilson until at least next week. It simply illustrates that the wider market’s favoured target of the week has, more often than not, failed to yield immediate dividends that weekend – the one-third success rate largely mirroring the slightly longer-term, slightly broader sample of our Herdwatch tables this season.