Yoane Wissa walks out of Brentford training camp after head turned by Tottenham & Newcastle transfer interest
WHAT HAPPENED?
BBC Sport claims the 28-year-old has returned to London from Portugal and will hold talks with Brentford director of football Phil Giles about his future. Tottenham and Nottingham Forest are said to be keeping tabs on the DR Congo international, and journalist Ben Jacobs states that Newcastle are set to make a formal bid in excess of £30 million ($40.5m) for Wissa.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
These are, arguably, worrying times for Brentford. They have lost manager Thomas Frank to Tottenham, star winger Bryan Mbeumo has joined Manchester United, club captain Christian Norgaard has left for Arsenal and now they could lose potent forward Wissa, too. The Bees have been an established Premier League side for years now but their place in the division could be under threat if all these key individuals leave.
DID YOU KNOW?
Wissa, who scored 19 goals in 35 Premier League games last season, joined Brentford from Lorient in August 2021. In 149 outings since then, he has bagged 49 goals in all competitions. Incidentally, if Wissa does go, the west London team are reportedly targeting Celtic forward Daizen Maeda.
WHAT NEXT?
Jacobs adds that while Brentford want to keep Wissa, and are prepared to offer him a new deal as his current terms expire next summer, his suitors feel a deal can be reached for under his reported £50m ($67.5m) price tag.
The best budget goalkeepers to sign on FPL – including Wolves & Bournemouth top class stoppers
The Fantasy Premier League is back with a host of changes and some brand new rules which upend the way we build our squads – and picking a starting squad is harder than ever.
As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, it’s my job to offer some advice to help you figure out the right players to sign before the season starts in just a few short weeks – so this is the first in a series of articles dedicated to highlighting some of the best budget-friendly buys at each position so you can pick out the players you need to afford all those expensive Salahs and Haalands.
I’m kicking things off by looking at the goalkeepers. As a relatively low-scoring position, this is usually where you want to keep it budget-conscious anyway, and starting with a £4.5m goalkeeper and a £4.0m back-up is generally the best way to go. That may change as the season goes on if there are plenty of cheap and high-scoring outfield players you can buy to allow more spending at the back, but I never advocate for spending heavily in net from the word go.
This year, however, FPL have made it a little trickier than usual and there are only six goalkeepers in the game who are priced at £4.5m or below who are likely to start for their sides this season – Anthony Patterson, Caoimhín Kelleher, José Sá, Djordje Petrović, Alphonse Aréola and Bart Verbruggen. So which should we start between the sticks?
Why Bournemouth’s Djordje Petrović might end up as the best £4.5m goalkeeper in FPL
Let’s start with the headline – based on the stats, Bournemouth’s new number one Petrović is probably the best starting £4.5m goalkeeper in the league, but that comes with a colossal caveat, which is that Bournemouth’s defence will look very different next season and there’s no guarantee that it will be especially effective without Dean Huijsen, Milos Kerkez and perhaps Ilia Zabarnyi.
Before we get to that, however, let’s figure out how I arrived at the conclusion in the first place – and it starts by making sure I’m picking a player who plays 90 minutes week in, week out.
As it stands, only four of the goalkeepers mentioned above fit that description. Aréola will probably be West Ham United’s first choice heading into the new campaign, but he lost his place part way through last season and while he won it back, his place is far from assured. Meanwhile Wolves’ number one, Sá, has been linked with a transfer away. That hasn’t happened yet, but I don’t want to gamble on a player who may or may not even be at his club come the start of the season.
In short, I don’t want to have to burn a free transfer on my goalkeeper, ideally ever, and that’s also why I’m not factoring in fixture difficulty. With other positions, it’s perfectly valid to sign the player you think will be best for the first five or six games while planning to get rid of them later on. With goalkeepers, you want to set and forget whenever possible.
Many readers may have noticed that I’ve excluded Leeds United’s Illan Meslier from these calculations, and that’s for the same reason – the club are actively trying to replace him. Perhaps he does somehow end up starting again come September, but it’s not likely, so I won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.
That leaves me really only considering four goalkeepers, but for the sake of a stats comparison, the table below shows where all six stand in regards to how many points they managed per match last season, their saves per game and how often their team kept clean sheets (which factors the defence in as well, so you don’t keep Kelleher’s inflated numbers from playing for Liverpool for instance).
Leave a Reply