Best FPL Captains 2025/26: The Captaincy Recap
A captaincy retrospective for FPL 2025/26 through GW34. Haaland was the only premium that paid off. Salah and Palmer combined for 216 points across 68 starts. Here is the full ledger.
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Last updated: 2 May 2026 (post-GW34). Coverage: GWs 1 to 34. We will refresh after GW38 with the final captain numbers. Source: Per-fixture stats and aggregated player totals via the FPL Pilot CLI against the production database.
The captaincy story of 2025/26 is short and uncomfortable. Haaland delivered. Salah and Palmer did not. The differential picks that won mini-leagues this season were almost all sub-£8m midfielders that nobody captained in August.
Here is the data, the ledger, and the lessons.
The Haaland, Salah, Palmer captaincy ledger
Pulled from per-fixture stats across the 34 gameweeks. Goals, assists, blanks (2 points or fewer), and double-digit hauls are season totals.
| Player | Games | Total pts | Goals | Assists | Avg pts | Hauls (10+) | Blanks (2 or fewer) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Haaland | 33 | 212 | 24 | 7 | 6.42 | 9 | 14 |
| B.Fernandes | 34 | 204 | 8 | 20 | 6.00 | 11 | 8 |
| Semenyo | 33 | 181 | 15 | 6 | 5.48 | 5 | 11 |
| Bowen | 34 | 167 | 8 | 12 | 4.91 | 4 | 14 |
| M.Salah | 34 | 116 | 7 | 6 | 3.41 | 2 | 19 |
| Palmer | 34 | 100 | 9 | 2 | 2.94 | 2 | 23 |
Haaland is the only premium that justified the armband. 6.42 average points per appearance, nine double-digit hauls, the highest scorer in the game outright. His best stretches were GW6 (16 pts) and GW17 (16 pts), with five identical 13-point hauls scattered across the autumn.
Mohamed Salah delivered 116 points across 34 starts. Two double-digit hauls all season. Nineteen blanks. By the end of January he was being doubled-up by less than 18% of the active manager base, which was already too high. Captaining him by template cost most managers two-figure rank drops over the autumn.
Cole Palmer is the more painful read. 100 points. Two hauls all year. Twenty-three blanks across 34 games. Chelsea’s structure changed twice mid-season and Palmer never re-established as a fixed-position attacker. The captaincy template held faith with him through November. The data did not justify it.
The genuinely correct captain choice for most of the season was Bruno Fernandes. 204 points, 11 hauls of 10 or more, eight blanks across 34 games. He was sub-15% captained in 30 of the 34 gameweeks.
Lesson: When the consensus premium midfielder gets to GW20 with single-digit returns and a sub-50% start probability, the right move is to sell the asset, not keep captaining hopefully.
Top scoring individual hauls of the season
The biggest single-gameweek scores from GW1 to GW34. None of these came from a Haaland-Salah-Palmer triumvirate. Most were defenders.
| Player | Team | GW | Points | Goals | Assists |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| J.Timber | ARS | 2 | 24 | 2 | 1 |
| Van de Ven | TOT | 9 | 23 | 2 | 0 |
| Lewis-Potter | BRE | 17 | 21 | 2 | 0 |
| Mavropanos | WHU | 32 | 21 | 2 | 0 |
| Palmer | CHE | 25 | 20 | 3 | 0 |
| Eze | ARS | 12 | 20 | 3 | 0 |
| Schade | BRE | 18 | 20 | 3 | 0 |
| Gibbs-White | NFO | 33 | 20 | 3 | 0 |
| Hudson-Odoi | NFO | 16 | 19 | 2 | 1 |
| João Pedro | CHE | 29 | 19 | 3 | 1 |
Three observations. First, four of the top ten hauls came from defenders. Captain EOs of zero. Second, only one of the top ten hauls (Palmer in GW25) came from a player on more than 25% captaincy in that GW. Third, Brentford alone provided two of the top ten single-GW scores from non-template players, which validates owning at least one Brentford asset in any squad.
Who should have been captained more often
The high-PPM, high-haul-frequency names that fell outside the consensus.
| Player | Price | Hauls (10+) | Best | Season pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bruno G. (Newcastle) | £6.8m | 8 | 14 | 137 |
| Cherki | £6.5m | 5 | 13 | 123 |
| Ekitiké | £9.0m | 5 | 15 | 125 |
| Foden | £8.0m | 5 | 17 | 114 |
| Casemiro | £5.8m | 4 | 15 | 160 |
Bruno Guimarães at £6.8m is the cleanest “shoulda captained” candidate of the season. Eight hauls of 10 or more in 34 games is more than Bowen, Salah, and Palmer combined. He started the season at £6.0m. Anyone who held him from GW1 had a captaincy differential available all year. The template never used it.
Casemiro at £5.8m with four 10+ hauls including a 15-pointer is the same story for free-hit and triple-captain windows. Most managers never even owned him.
The captain calls everyone got wrong
Without per-gameweek captaincy ownership history we can’t pin every consensus disaster to a specific percentage. What we can do is read the blank counts. Across 68 combined appearances, Salah and Palmer registered 42 blanks (62%). In any given week the template was captaining at least one of them. That is the structural mistake.
A few specific calls that the template got wrong:
- GW16 to GW20 was the consensus “hold Salah through Liverpool’s good run” stretch. He returned 4, 2, 2, 9, 2 across that block. The cumulative captaincy bleed was severe.
- GW25 to GW30 was the “Palmer is back” period. He hauled once (20 pts in GW25) and blanked four times. Most templates kept the armband on him through the whole stretch.
- The autumn Haaland blanks (GWs 11, 18, 22) cost less than they should have because Haaland’s hauls in the same period were 13+ points each, dragging the average up.
The template is not always wrong. But when the underlying numbers say a player is dead and his captaincy stays high, that is a rank arbitrage opportunity for anyone willing to switch to Bruno Fernandes or Bruno Guimarães.
What this teaches for the run-in
Four gameweeks remain. Three takeaways for GW35 to GW38.
1. Default to Bruno Fernandes if Haaland’s fixture is rough. B.Fernandes has 11 hauls in 34 games, the most in the dataset. He is on penalties. He is the second-most-reliable captain in the game right now and probably the best on a points-per-fixture basis until GW38.
2. The City DGW in GW36 is the only confirmed double in the run-in. Manchester City and Crystal Palace play twice in GW36. GW37 and GW38 are single gameweeks across the board. With Salah ruled out for the season (muscle injury, expected back 24 May), the triple-captain shortlist for GW36 is Haaland (floor) or Cherki (ceiling). Bruno Fernandes is the cleanest single-GW captain for GW37 and GW38.
3. Mini-league swings come from the differential picks. At this stage of the season, captaining the consensus pick guarantees you won’t gain rank. If you need a green arrow in the final four, the high-PPM differentials above (Bruno G., Cherki, Casemiro) are where the swing comes from.
For a fuller view of the run-in, pair this with the season review data piece and the final-four rank recovery guide. For an example of how this analysis applied in-season, see the GW30 captain picks guide. The GW38 captaincy framework is the forward-looking piece on the season’s last armband call.
See this week’s captain picks ranked by EV.
Per-fixture stats and player totals sourced via the FPL Pilot CLI against the production database on 2 May 2026 (post-GW34). Captain-EO percentages are qualitative because per-GW captaincy history is not exposed via the FPL API. We will refresh this post after GW38.
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