What defensive workload, creative freedom and big-money transfers tell us about individual value.

By Gerry, Fantasy Matchup Edge

Imagine a midfielder winning tackle after tackle, breaking up attacks, carrying the ball out of trouble — and still trudging off after another defeat. Has he played brilliantly despite his team, or has his team’s struggle given him more opportunities to show what he can do?

It sounds like a slightly backwards question. Surely good players are more valuable when they help good teams win? Yet football has a habit of confusing a team’s results with the quality, usefulness and even the statistics of the players within it.

For certain midfielders, a struggling side can be an unusually revealing place to play. It can also be a flattering one. The trick is working out which is which.

When more defending means more opportunities

Take Elliot Anderson. In 2025/26, his final Premier League season with Nottingham Forest, he collected 52 Fantasy Premier League points purely from defensive contributions. He reached the qualifying threshold in 26 of his 37 starts — a remarkable 70.3% success rate. This wasn’t a goal-scoring run or a handful of assists. It was a season’s worth of work without the ball.

And I know what you’re thinking: that’s just Fantasy Football. Yes, but sometimes FPL points can be a good barometer of a player’s performance, especially when looking at DEFCON (Defensive Contributions). A player scoring highly on that metric is doing a lot for his team without necessarily making the headlines — those points aren’t derived from goals or assists.

FPL now awards midfielders two points for reaching 12 qualifying defensive actions in a match, counting clearances, blocks, interceptions, tackles and recoveries. It is a useful, if imperfect, way of acknowledging the midfielders who spend their Saturdays cleaning up everybody else’s problems.

Anderson has since moved to Manchester City, where things get more interesting. According to Premier League analysis, Forest averaged 46.5% possession last season, compared with City’s 61%. You would expect fewer opportunities to win the ball back in a side that has it more often.

But there is a catch. Declan Rice would have earned 62 such defensive-contribution points in his final West Ham season in 2022/23 under today’s scoring rules. Rodri, meanwhile, would have earned 46 in City’s possession-dominant 2021/22 campaign. That suggests a player’s role matters at least as much as the general quality of his team.

Source: Premier League defensive-contribution analysis (July 2026). Retrospective estimates marked with an asterisk.

The numbers for this weekend tell a similar story

The latest Fantasy Matchup Edge projections offer a good snapshot. For Gameweek 9, Ipswich midfielder Exequiel Palacios has a projected 70.6% chance of reaching the defensive-contribution threshold, Everton’s James Garner 67.4%, and Leeds’ Anton Stach 56.6%. Anderson, now at City, is projected at 70.8% against Brighton.

These are probabilities, not guarantees, and they assume the players start. They also depend on the particular matchup. But the fact that Anderson remains so highly rated by the projections after his move is an important challenge to the easy theory that defensive midfielders only shine in weaker teams.

Sorare’s All-Around scoring adds another perspective. It recognises useful actions beyond goals and assists — and penalises mistakes, too. FME’s current forecast has Sunderland’s Granit Xhaka on 21.5 projected All-Around points against Coventry, almost level with Arsenal’s Rice on 22.0 against Liverpool. They play in very different teams, but their expected individual contributions can still be comparable.

The freedom to be the main man

There is an attacking version of the same argument, and Jack Grealish might be its best-known example.

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Aston Villa finished 11th in 2020/21, having narrowly escaped relegation the season before. Yet Grealish was outstanding: six goals, ten assists, 81 chances created, 65 successful dribbles and 110 fouls won in just 26 Premier League appearances. Villa were not title challengers. Their captain, however, looked like a superstar.

Then came the £100 million move to Manchester City. In his first league season, he made another 26 appearances, but his return fell to three goals and three assists. Did the move somehow make him half the footballer? Obviously not. He was no longer required to be the centre of almost every attack, and his role within Pep Guardiola’s side demanded different things. He went on to play a major part in City’s 2022/23 treble.

James Maddison offers a similar warning against judging players solely by their team’s league position. He produced ten goals and nine assists in 30 appearances in 2022/23. Leicester were relegated anyway. A good player can be excellent within a bad season.

Why the big move doesn’t tell the same story for everybody

Of course, the opposite happens, too. Rice left 14th-placed West Ham for Arsenal in 2023 and actually improved his attacking returns: from four goals and two assists to seven goals and eight assists in his first league season. He wasn’t merely the biggest fish in West Ham’s pond; he had the qualities to expand his influence in a better side.

Kalvin Phillips illustrates the risk at the other end. He had been fundamental to Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds and was an England international, but after moving to City in 2022, he struggled to establish a regular role. Danny Drinkwater, a title winner at Leicester, experienced something similar at Chelsea. Injuries, fitness and competition all matter, so neither case proves that their previous statistics were misleading. But importance at one club cannot simply be transferred with the player’s registration.

Source: Historical Premier League goals and assists, BBC Sport / FBref.

What does value look like over the next five games?

That brings us back to the present. Nottingham Forest currently sit 18th and Coventry 19th, yet FME’s FPL Fixture Difficulty projections over the next five games rank Forest’s Morgan Gibbs-White fifth among all players, with 28.46 expected points, and Coventry’s Jack Rudoni 15th, with 26.01.

The figures assume each man starts all five matches, rather than predicting that he actually will. They do not suggest that Forest and Coventry are secretly excellent, or that struggling creates extra goals and assists. They suggest that particular players can still have favourable roles and matchups even when their teams are having a miserable time.

Source: Fantasy Matchup Edge, GW9–GW13 validated snapshot of 26 October 2026. Figures assume starts.

So, can a midfielder really be more valuable when his team struggles?

Yes — depending on what we mean by valuable. A defensive midfielder can have more chances to demonstrate his ball-winning ability in a side under pressure. A creative midfielder can become the focal point of almost everything his team tries to do. Both may produce eye-catching individual numbers in a team that keeps losing.

But a larger workload isn’t automatically better performance, and a higher fantasy score isn’t the same as being a better footballer. The best test is whether the player can take those qualities into a different environment, where there are fewer desperate tackles to make, fewer attacks built around him and possibly more talented teammates demanding the ball.

Perhaps the answer isn’t that struggling teams make midfielders better. It’s that they sometimes make certain strengths impossible to ignore — while hiding others. That’s worth remembering before deciding a player has become less valuable just because he’s finally joined a winning side.

Gerry is the creator of Fantasy Matchup Edge, an independent football analytics platform providing statistical projections and matchup insights for FPL and Sorare. He enjoys finding the stories hidden in football’s numbers, questioning conventional wisdom and occasionally discovering that football has absolutely no interest in what his model thinks.