66 new faces in the Premier League. Should you draft any of them?
A defender's numbers from abroad arrive almost intact. A striker's barely arrive at all. Here's this summer's intake sorted by how much of the foreign line you can believe.
Every summer your league drafts a few players that actually nobody watched. All you have is a number from another country, and that number lies in a very particular way.
Last summer it lied about Viktor Gyökeres, who arrived at Arsenal on 39 goals for Sporting, scored 14, and finished 21st among forwards. It told the truth about Anton Stach, who scored one goal all season in the Bundesliga, joined Leeds, and finished ninth among midfielders.
Five seasons of arrivals say which way it will lie about this summer’s.
What actually comes across the border
Take every action Fantrax pays for and ask how much of it a player still puts up over in the EPL.
There’s no overlap. Every attacking action sits below every defensive one. He brings his tackling, his heading, his interceptions and his clearances across untouched. He actually makes more clearances here, because arriving usually means joining a team that does more defending. And he leaves behind a quarter of his creating and nearly 40% of his finishing.
Goals and assists are the two worst numbers on the sheet. They’re also the only two anybody writes about.
Where he came from is a discount, not a verdict
Out of Spain, Italy, Germany or France, knock off very little. Out of the Championship or the Eredivisie, knock off about a quarter. That’s the whole job the origin league does. It sets the size of the haircut and it barely touches anything else, so a Championship line and a La Liga line are equally worth reading once you’ve applied the right multiplier.
Watch the Eredivisie especially. Its arrivals post the highest foreign scoring rates of anybody and land on thoroughly ordinary Premier League ones. A big number in the Netherlands is mostly the Netherlands.
Why the striker is the trap
And it really is the striker, not the forward. Fantrax files strikers and wingers (and sometimes midfielders) under the same position and they aren't the same animal. Of the 105 new arrivals labeled as forwards, 44 are central strikers and 41 are wide attackers. The reason isn't that strikers are mysterious. It's what Fantrax pays them for.
Read it top to bottom and you’re reading a slow fade from orange to blue. A center back’s points are built almost entirely out of the actions that survive a border: headers, interceptions, tackles, clearances, nearly 80% of his score. A striker’s are built out of the other end, where goals and shots on target pay him half his points between them and both are among the worst travelers in the game.
So what about this summer?
Here’s what I won’t tell you: whether any of these players will start. This is the unpredictable part, and how much a player plays matters far more than how good he was abroad.
Instead, here’s what we can actually tell. How big is his foreign number, once you’ve applied his league’s discount? And how much is a number like that worth believing, given his role, how long his foreign season was, and where he’s landed?
Defenders fill the top half, attackers the bottom one, and that isn’t a quirk of this summer’s names. Over 5 seasons a center back’s foreign line has landed within about a point of what it promised. A striker’s has missed by nearly 3. If 7 points per start looks low for a fantasy number, it is. These stats exclude clean sheets and goals against (team dependent) and run about 7% under a full Fantrax line.
Who to draft
Ten arrivals sit in that top right box. Every single one is a defender, and Vušković is out at the far edge on his own.
Luka Vušković, Brighton, average draft position 125. A center back out of the Bundesliga, which is the league that takes almost nothing off a number, and 12.8 points a start is the largest believable figure anybody brought over this summer. Everything in this piece points at him.
The rest are hidden gems going in the 150s or later. Bobby Thomas at Coventry (148), Tarik Muharemović at Leeds (157), Óscar Mingueza at Palace (195), Marco Palestra at Chelsea (224), Liam Kitching at Coventry (256). Every one of them sits in the top right, and the room is taking them anywhere from twenty to a hundred and thirty picks after Vušković for no reason the history supports.
And four with no draft position at all, which means your league hasn’t thought about them: Eiran Cashin and Michael Svoboda at Brighton, Tyler Bindon at Forest, Aurèle Amenda at Coventry.
Who to avoid
The trap isn’t a bad player, it’s an early pick spent on a number that historically doesn’t repeat. Only two of these are going early enough to hurt you.
Víctor Muñoz, Liverpool, ADP 80. You’re paying a top hundred pick for a median projection. He’s an awkward one to file, incidentally. The classifier reads him as a shooter and so does his shot count, but he scored six goals in 2,668 minutes of La Liga while completing 2.5 dribbles a game, which is a winger’s line wearing a striker’s label. Either way, neither role is one the history trusts.
Hayden Hackney, Everton, ADP 118. A large Championship number, 11.0 points a start, attached to a creator. Creators have missed what their line implied by 2.3 points a start, second worst of the six roles. He’s a fine player and this is simply too early to find out.
Christos Tzolis, Arsenal, ADP 185. The biggest number on the board by a mile: 21.9 a start in Belgium, still 18 after the discount. Worth saying that his points come from creating rather than finishing, which is the better half of an attacker’s game, and he’s still sitting well below the reliability line. Buy him as the lottery ticket he is, not as a starter.
Ellis Simms, Coventry, ADP 273. The purest version of the trap, though the price is low enough that it barely matters. A huge Championship striker’s line, and the striker’s line is the one that lies most.
The two lists have the same shape. The believable arrivals are dull, defensive and cheap. The exciting ones are attackers carrying a big number and a history of not repeating it. Your league will take the second group first.
465 players who joined the Premier League from one of eight European leagues over the last five seasons. Both sides of every move are scored on the same twelve Fantrax categories, so the comparison is like for like; clean sheets and goals against are left out because they describe the club he left rather than the player. Reliability on the last chart is fitted only on seasons it hadn’t yet seen and never looks at the player’s own number. Draft positions are the live board on 6 August 2026 and will move.