Arsenal Won the League: The FPL Story of 2025/26

Data current as of: 20 May 2026 (after GW37). Coverage: GWs 1 to 37, season-end stats.

Arsenal are Premier League champions. Eighty-two points, plus-43 goal difference, and only twenty-six goals conceded across thirty-seven matches. The defensive record is the lowest in the league by seven goals. The clean sheet count, nineteen, is the highest by three. This is the season Arsenal built the league’s most reliable back line and turned it into a title.

For FPL, this title also rewrote the value map. Three of the top eight scorers in the entire game wear an Arsenal shirt. The most-owned defender in the game plays for Arsenal. A £4.9m midfielder who started the season at £5.2m outscored Martin Ødegaard by fifty-seven points.

Here is the post-mortem.

Final 2025/26 Arsenal table position

Team	Played	Points	GF	GA	GD
Arsenal	37	82	69	26	+43
Man City	37	78	76	33	+43
Man United	37	68	66	50	+16
Aston Villa	37	62	54	48	+6

Same goal difference as City. Four more points. The title was won at the back.

Arsenal top scorers by FPL points

Player	Pos	Price	Points	G	A	CS	Own%
Gabriel	DEF	£7.3m	208	3	5	18	46.1
Rice	MID	£7.2m	184	4	9	18	24.3
Raya	GKP	£6.2m	162	0	0	19	36.4
Saka	MID	£10.0m	157	7	10	12	13.0
J.Timber	DEF	£6.0m	149	3	6	13	15.4
Saliba	DEF	£6.3m	137	1	0	15	17.2
Zubimendi	MID	£4.9m	131	5	1	16	2.8
Gyökeres	FWD	£9.1m	127	14	1	12	18.0
Trossard	MID	£6.6m	119	6	6	11	2.0
Eze	MID	£7.3m	112	7	3	11	8.9

Five of the top six are defenders or a goalkeeper. The most-owned Arsenal asset of the season was Gabriel at 46.1%. Saka, the supposed premium template pick, was the fourth highest-scoring Arsenal player and finished on 13.0% ownership.

Gabriel: defender of the season

Gabriel finished on 208 points, the second-highest defender total in the entire game behind one Manchester City defender. He banked eighteen clean sheets across his appearances, scored three goals from set pieces, and racked up five assists. He started the season at £6.6m and ended at £7.3m, a seven-tenths price rise that priced him out of August squads but rewarded anyone who held from the opening weekend.

The underlying numbers show no fluke. 4.65 xG, 2.73 xA. Gabriel was the third-most threatening defender in the league on set-piece deliveries and the bonus-points engine in Arsenal’s back four. He averaged 5.6 BPS per appearance, a top-five number for any defender. The clean sheets did the heavy lifting; the goal threat covered the variance.

If you owned Gabriel from GW1 to GW37, he returned 28.5 points per million on current price. The defender pick of the season was decided in the first week.

Rice and Saka: the midfield split

Declan Rice finished the season on 184 points at £7.2m, the third-highest Arsenal scorer and the highest among midfielders. Four goals, nine assists, eighteen clean sheets. The story underneath is the xA number, 8.16, which matched his actual assist tally almost exactly. Rice did not get lucky. He created at midfielder-level volume from a deeper role and banked clean-sheet points on top.

Saka’s season looked different. 157 points from 7G/10A and 8.70 xG plus 8.55 xA, a return almost identical to the underlying. The points-per-million number is the issue: 15.7 at £10.0m. That is the lowest PPM of any £10m+ midfielder who played 2,000+ minutes this season. Saka was not bad. He was expensive for what he delivered, and his ownership reflected that. He ended at 13.0% owned, down from 23% at the start of August.

The premium-midfielder bracket cratered league-wide in 2025/26. Salah ended on 116 points, Palmer on 102. In that context, Saka’s 157 was respectable. As a captaincy option in a season where Haaland and Bruno Fernandes existed, it was not.

Zubimendi: the bargain of the year

Martín Zubimendi entered the season at £5.2m as Arsenal’s new defensive midfielder. He ended it at £4.9m with 131 points, five goals, and a 2.8% ownership.

Five goals from 2.94 xG suggests modest overperformance. The rest of the profile is sustainable: 2,950 minutes, sixteen clean sheets, the kind of nailed-on starter you build squads around. At £4.9m he produced more points than every Arsenal forward except Gyökeres, more than Eze, and more than Ødegaard. He was the second-best £4.5-5.0m midfielder in the entire game.

The lesson is structural: nailed defensive midfielders at title-contending teams who pick up the occasional set-piece-driven goal are how you free up £1.5m+ for premium upgrades elsewhere. Zubimendi was that template in 2025/26. Casemiro was the equivalent at Manchester United.

The defensive triumvirate: Timber, Saliba, Calafiori

Three Arsenal defenders cleared 108 points. Two of them, Timber and Calafiori, started below £6m.

Player	Start price	End price	Points	G+A	CS
J.Timber	£6.3m	£6.0m	149	9	13
Saliba	£5.9m	£6.3m	137	1	15
Calafiori	£5.6m	£5.6m	108	3	13

Timber is the standout. Nine attacking returns from full-back, thirteen clean sheets, and a price that dropped from £6.3m to £6.0m. That price drop is misleading. He missed five gameweeks across two injury stretches and the FPL market over-penalised him each time. Anyone who held through the dips got the best per-million Arsenal defender of the season at 24.8.

Saliba’s profile is the opposite. One goal, no assists, fifteen clean sheets, and a rising price. Pure CS merchant. His ownership rose from 12% to 17.2% across the season as managers chased his defensive ceiling, and he is the safest non-Gabriel Arsenal bet for 2026/27 if his price holds.

Calafiori is the third option. Sub-£6m, thirteen clean sheets, and minutes that ramped up across the season. He is the value pick if Gabriel and Saliba both rise above £6.5m at the August reset.

Raya: the title-winning keeper

David Raya finished on 162 points at £6.2m. Nineteen clean sheets. He started at £6.0m, so he banked a 0.2 price rise and 162 points, which gives a PPM of 26.1.

Two keepers in the entire division finished above him on points: Pickford and Donnarumma. Both cost more. Raya was the highest-points goalkeeper on a per-million basis among keepers above £5.5m, and the only sub-£6.5m keeper to clear 160 points.

For 2026/27 he is a likely £6.0-6.5m asset. Arsenal’s defensive structure is the lowest xG-against in the league over the last six gameweeks at 0.67. If the central defensive trio holds, Raya is the auto-pick at the position before you even look at price.

Gyökeres: the modest premium

Viktor Gyökeres scored fourteen Premier League goals from 13.54 xG. He finished on 127 points at £9.1m. The xG profile says the goal volume was earned. The points total says it was not enough.

The breakdown is unkind: fourteen goals, one assist, just six double-digit hauls across the season. He was Arsenal’s most fouled forward and their most central goal source, but the team’s structure routes returns through the wide forwards (Saka, Trossard) and the midfield runners (Rice, Eze). Gyökeres scored. He did not creator-pile.

At £9.1m he ended the season as the eleventh-highest forward by points. Watkins, Bowen, Thiago, and João Pedro all out-scored him at lower prices. The takeaway: he was the right Arsenal forward to own, but Arsenal forwards were not the right premium bracket to spend in.

The disappointments: Ødegaard and Martinelli

Two players cost owners large amounts of opportunity points.

Ødegaard finished on 74 points. He played 1,347 minutes, less than half of Rice’s. Two extended injury stretches plus a third late-season knock kept him off the pitch. His underlying numbers when he played (4.98 xA in 1,347 minutes, a per-90 rate of 0.33) were elite. He just was not on the pitch. If you owned him at £7.8m from August, he returned 9.5 points per million. That is bottom-decile for any £7m+ midfielder.

Martinelli is the harder story. He played 975 minutes across the season as the team’s rotation winger. Fifty points, one goal, four assists. He started at £6.8m and stayed there. He never lost the starting role on Saka’s flank for long enough to justify ownership, never returned hauls when he did start, and ended at 0.9% ownership. The 2026/27 question is whether Arteta’s structure has space for him at all.

xG over and underperformance: Arsenal players

The gap between goals scored and expected goals tells you who got lucky, who got unlucky, and who matched their underlying threat.

Eze is the regression risk. Seven goals from 4.48 xG is the kind of variance that almost always corrects. Zubimendi’s overperformance is smaller and the role is structural, so the cliff is shallower. Saka and Gabriel both underperformed their xG, which suggests bounce-back upside heading into August.

What an Arsenal-only “best XI” would have scored

If you had built an Arsenal-only spine from August, the maximum-scoring eleven looks like:

• GKP: Raya (162)
• DEF: Gabriel (208), Timber (149), Saliba (137)
• MID: Rice (184), Saka (157), Zubimendi (131), Trossard (119)
• FWD: Gyökeres (127)
• Bench-as-starters: Eze (112), Calafiori (108)

Total starting points: 1,494 across eleven players.

That is an average of 135.8 per asset, which is a top-quartile FPL roster on its own. The interesting note: only one of those eleven is a premium (Saka at £10.0m). The rest are £4.9-9.1m, the middle of the market. Arsenal’s title was built on mid-price talent rewarding mid-price prices.

What this teaches for 2026/27

Five takeaways from the title-winning season.

1. Gabriel and Raya are the August defaults. 208 and 162 points respectively at sub-£7.5m and sub-£6.5m end prices. Both will rise. Both still look like auto-picks unless Arsenal’s defensive structure visibly changes in pre-season.

2. Rice is the cleanest non-premium midfielder in the game. 184 points at £7.2m from a deep-lying role with clean-sheet bonuses. He is the £7-7.5m benchmark for 2026/27 midfield builds, ahead of every Liverpool, City, and United option in that bracket.

3. The Arsenal back line scales to multi-player ownership. Three Arsenal defenders cleared 108 points. Saliba, Timber, and Calafiori at sub-£6.5m all look ownable from August. If you can fit two Arsenal defenders plus Raya in a wildcard build, that is twenty-two clean-sheet shots between three assets.

4. Saka is the premium to question, not back. 13.0% ownership and 157 points at £10.0m says the market figured this out across the season. If he is priced at £9.5m or lower for 2026/27, he becomes a re-entry option. At £10.5m he stays a pass.

5. Zubimendi is the bench-fodder template. £4.9m, 131 points, sixteen clean sheets. If he is priced at £5.0-5.5m at the start of next season, he is the third-bench midfielder pick for nearly every squad shape. Cheap nailed starters at title teams are how you fund the front three.

For the broader season picture, the 2025/26 season review covers every position group with the same xG receipts. For the rest of this window, pair the Arsenal data above with the final-four rank recovery guide before locking your end-of-season transfers.

The 2026/27 build starts with the defenders. Arsenal won the league with theirs. Plan accordingly.