Karl Darlow

Points are last season’s total pulled 20% toward the positional average, then blended at equal weight with FPL’s published preseason rank. Neither number ranks players better than the other on its own — we measured that and it was a tie — but the combination won every opponent model in an 800-draft simulation, so we show the combination. The ranking evidence is a tie, not a win; the draft evidence is one season. Shrinking beat the raw total in 4 of 4 held-out seasons. Goals, assists and minutes are NOT projected for a returning player: those cells show his actual 2025-26 figures, labelled as such, because a backward-looking number under a forward-looking heading reads as a forecast whatever the tooltip says. The projected has beaten them. Rank is this player’s position among everyone we project for 2026-27 — a pool that excludes players who left and includes 69 new signings. Hover any cell for its basis. For a returning player this starts from last season’s actual total — in our own testing nothing we tried beat it. Newcomers, who have no last season here, are estimated from what players drafted around their rank have historically scored. Every adjustment is listed above, so you can disagree with one without discarding the number. Lines marked context are facts about what changed around this player over the summer — a transfer, his club’s trajectory, a departed creator. They are not part of the calculation and deliberately move nothing: we have tested nine different ways to improve on last season’s points and none of them worked, so we won’t invent a size for an effect we can’t measure. They are there because a drafter can weigh them and a model can’t. What this does and doesn’t claim.