# The Model XI: our engine's own fifteen, and why Haaland is not in it

> A 3-5-2 projecting 65.92 points with B.Fernandes captained — built on six-week horizon value, market-implied fixture strength, and one deliberate act of heresy.

By the evmax model · 21 August 2026 · https://evmax.ai/fpl/gw1/our-squad/

This is the squad we will actually run all season, transfers and all, and it starts with the decision most managers would call reckless: no Haaland. The engine prices him at 7.8 expected points against Bournemouth and nothing about that number is bad — it is simply what £15.5m buys. Spread across cheaper players, the same money buys more. B.Fernandes at £12.0m projects 8.85 expected points away at promoted Hull, the highest figure on the entire board, and he wears the armband: 17.7 doubled.

The spine under him is unglamorous on purpose. Everton host Crystal Palace, and the model likes the whole block: Tarkowski projects 4.67 with a 45.7% chance of banking the defensive-contribution bonus, and Ndiaye 5.13 at a value of 0.856 points per million — the best of any midfielder this week. Raya (4.63, with 2.2 of it from clean-sheet scenarios), Virgil (4.28) and Senesi (4.35, 58.4% defensive-contribution probability) give the back line three routes to points that do not require anyone to score.

> Fifteen players, fifteen projected starters, £100.0m to the penny — no bench fodder, no dead money.

Up front, Thiago (5.89) and Watkins (4.94) carry the forward line at £8.0m each, and the midfield is completed by Gibbs-White (4.83), Szoboszlai (4.71) and Le Fée (4.79 at just 9.9% ownership). The bench is the quiet flex: Sánchez, N.Williams, Calvert-Lewin and Shaw all project to start their matches, which means an automatic substitution costs us real points instead of zero — and keeps a Bench Boost live whenever we choose to play it.

One free transfer a week means you live with your opening squad for a month, so this
was never a week-one decision. Every pick was chosen on six-gameweek projections,
simulated week by week: gameweek 1 from live market odds, weeks 2 to 6 from
fixture-difficulty priors calibrated on those odds and replaced by real prices as each
week arrives. Over the full run B.Fernandes projects 42.3 points to Haaland's 36.9 at
a price 3.5 lower, Thiago 33.8, Ndiaye 31.3, and the Everton block holds all six
weeks. The same lens is why Saka misses out despite the best week-one fixture in the
game: 6.1 this week, then 3.4 and 3.5 in the two weeks after.

Why publish a squad that ignores a player three-quarters of the game owns? Because the point of this site is that the numbers are the argument. Owning Haaland is insurance against the crowd; our model is paid to take the expected-value side of that trade. The Consensus XI on this site owns him, captains him, and follows the crowd all the way down — and every week we will publish both scores. One of these philosophies is going to be embarrassed by May. We are genuinely not sure which.

**Bottom line:** The Model XI projects 65.92 points in gameweek 1 with B.Fernandes captained — the engine's pure expected-value squad, run publicly all season against the consensus alternative.

**Bottom line:** The Model XI projects 65.92 points in gameweek 1 with B.Fernandes captained — the engine's pure expected-value squad, run publicly all season against the consensus alternative.

## The data

| # | Player | Team | xPts | Ceiling | Captain EV | Pts/m |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Raya | ARS | 4.63 | 8.17 | 9.25 | 0.77 |
| 2 | Virgil | LIV | 4.28 | 10.97 | 8.57 | 0.66 |
| 3 | Senesi | TOT | 4.35 | 10.55 | 8.69 | 0.72 |
| 4 | Tarkowski | EVE | 4.67 | 11.16 | 9.33 | 0.78 |
| 5 | B.Fernandes | MUN | 8.85 | 19.70 | 17.70 | 0.74 |
| 6 | Ndiaye | EVE | 5.13 | 15.04 | 10.27 | 0.86 |
| 7 | Gibbs-White | NFO | 4.83 | 13.53 | 9.67 | 0.60 |
| 8 | E.Le Fée | SUN | 4.79 | 13.02 | 9.59 | 0.80 |
| 9 | Szoboszlai | LIV | 4.71 | 12.49 | 9.43 | 0.67 |
| 10 | Thiago | BRE | 5.89 | 14.16 | 11.78 | 0.74 |
| 11 | Watkins | AVL | 4.94 | 13.15 | 9.88 | 0.62 |
| 12 | Sánchez | CHE | 3.14 | 7.75 | 6.29 | 0.63 |
| 13 | N.Williams | NFO | 4.10 | 10.80 | 8.20 | 0.82 |
| 14 | Calvert-Lewin | LEE | 3.97 | 11.68 | 7.95 | 0.66 |
| 15 | Shaw | MUN | 3.98 | 7.99 | 7.95 | 0.88 |

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Method: Market odds (de-vigged) → Dixon-Coles scorelines → 50k Monte-Carlo simulations, scored on the official Fantasy Premier League points table.
Data license: CC BY 4.0 (attribution: evmax, https://evmax.ai). Machine-readable JSON: https://evmax.ai/api/fpl/gw1/our-squad.json