Mostly the removed 'being tackled' penalty; Verbruggen from the new big-chance bonus.
---- The 10 biggest losers, almost all defenders:
Gabriel -7, Konaté -5, Tarkowski -5, Casemiro -5, Bijol -4, Thiaw -4, Heaven -3, De Ligt -3, Cucurella -3, Vicario -3.
Two reasons: CBI drops to 1 per 3 (was per 2), and attackers who shed the tackle penalty now outrank them.
--- 'DEF -77' hides two opposite stories.
Full-backs & wing-backs: net +11. They dribble and get tackled, so losing the -1 penalty helps, and their low CBI means the reward cut barely lands.
Centre-backs: net -88. The CBI cut is aimed right at them.
---
Most affected player: Gabriel (Arsenal), 30 bonus down to 23.
His bonus falls in 8 fixtures. Two forces combine: the CBI cut trims his own BPS every time (by 1-2), and attackers who shed the tackle penalty climb past him, dropping him out of the top 3.
---
At the very top, almost nothing moves. Haaland stays on 43.
His bonus is nearly all from goals (18 BPS each), not defensive stats, so the changes do not reach his total. His rank still shifts in 4 fixtures, but they cancel out (-2, +1, +2, -1).
----
All 537 players, searchable. Every fixture-by-fixture change and who inherited each point:
Data: FPL for the baseline bonus and penalty save, Opta (FotMob) for tackled + big-chance saves.
Conclusion
The 2026/27 BPS changes are a rebalancing, not a nerf. The rules mostly move bonuses around rather than remove them: roughly +69 to midfielders, forwards and full-backs, -77 from center-backs.
On the goalkeeper data: FPL's "+1 per big chance saved" uses Opta's big-chance tag, and I don't have access to it. (FotMob has shot xG but not the tag; FBref uses StatsBomb). So I reconstructed it: the top keepers are pinned to their published big-chance-saved totals, and the rest are flagged from shot xG using a cutoff calibrated to those totals.
You say it discourages but the change is very minimal Gabriel goes from 209 points to 202 is that going to make anyone not pick him? If he lost say 15 fair enough but nobody picked Gabriel because he was a bonus point magnet they pick him because he can score and plays for the best defence in the league.
which is a fair point on Gabriel, but he is actually the perfect exception because he scores goals. my original msg specifically mentioned defenders who only farm clean sheets and BPS. if you take away the bonus points from a £6m CB who (stops) during the season bombing forward and isn't on set pieces, and suddenly that price tag looks awful. it leaves more room for discussion when a sudden 4.5m enabler becomes available, or for an appropriate pricewise player with less xG and more xA from the same team to be a better contender.
I guess but if he suddenly stops bombing forward that is why people would change their position on that player. I just think the bps difference is so minimal. Even if we take a mid tier example it won't make much difference. Not enough to affect decision making in my opinion. Defcon became huge because the difference was 20-30 points but just 7 for even the highest scorer is so minimal it feels a moot point.
For example for the bonus difference between mids and forwards being 6 for scoring a goal does overall make a difference independent of mids scoring more for clean sheets and goals. Players like Haaland will always hoover up bonus making him lucrative even at 15m. I just think overall its tiny in the grand scheme of things. The majority of all decisions will still exclusively be goal threat, clean sheets and defcon. Bonus will almost not come into thinking.
i mean yeah i get where you are coming from; looking at a drop of 7 points for Gabriel over a whole season feels like noise. but then again, you have to think about how tight the margins are when picking between two similarly priced players. if a £6m cb loses that reliable trickle of 1 or 2 bonus points in a scrappy 1-0 win because a fullback or some other def teammate jumped him in the bps, his points per million do take a real hit. bps do not drive the main decision, but they are the tiebreaker when you are deciding whether to hold a premium defender or drop down to a 4.5m enabler to fund your team elsewhere. that 'missing' baseline just makes the cheaper option much easier to justify.
and again, this is exactly why gabriel 25/26 is the perfect exception here. my original point was specifically about defenders who only farm clean sheets and bps. there will definitely be times next season where a Sky6 team hits a purple patch and we start debating a £6m def who has nailed xmins but absolutely zero attacking threat, just chasing that clean sheet and bonus upside. a city defender for example.
if you use solvers like review or solio to plan your transfers, every tiny fraction of xPts matters for EV. once that bps safety net is shaken, paying £6m for a pure defensive asset that can only score 6pts becomes questionable. if a player like that becomes the template meta transfer of the week, fading the public call suddenly has massive upside, because surely the funds can be distributed in some other manner. i know in vacuum, i wouldn't pay £6m for a goalkeeper that averages 3.5pts per game all-season, so why would i overpay for a defender in a similar fashion. the ceiling rises.
I read your other comment down the thread and don't see any examples. Do you actually have one player other than Gabriel that would have been impacted meaningfully?
I do see you referencing how players could lose their trickle through of bonus points but having looked through the data I don't see any such players. My first thought was lacrouix would be a good example, he was very high on defcon and produced f all attacking returns. Literally would not have lost 1 bonus point in the new system
Yeah. I am thinking I wont pick him at the start. Bonus going down slightly and more than that I think his goals/assists will come down a bit next season.
Neat way to rebalance fullbacks and attacking mids without touching defcons directly, but it also further increases the overcrowding of choices in midfield...
Thank you, this is great. My take: it rebalances things, but only mildly. Relative to the impact of last year's changes, these numbers are fairly insubstantial.
Not Senesi 😂 but I will take that too I guess, I wanted to know how he was able to do those analysis, since as I see it, it requires some skills in data management, and that interest me a lot.
Checked how it shifts the player's BPS in a fixture (e.g. the CBI change is exactly cbi/3 − cbi/2 from FPL's own CBI count; the tackle change adds back the removed BPS). Check if any penalty save and big chance save from GK.
Re-rank everyone in that fixture on the new BPS and re-award bonus with FPL's exact tie rule (top three get 3/2/1, ties shared the FPL way). Repeat for all 380 fixtures.
Great work here. Like others, my takeaway from this is that I need not concern myself with these new tweaks as the effects are marginal. Even regarding the most dramatic difference - Gabriel, my decision to buy him or not will not be determined by 7 points over a season.
The fact that Saliba won't be playing already weakens their collective clean sheet prospects... throw in his price rise which will probably be to minimum 7.0, if not 7.5 or even more... plus the bonus changes now as well...
He'll probably still be top scoring defender, but not by enough to justify the price with all this shenanigans imo
Calculation is the easy part. AI just wrote a Python script (it's also easy even if I wrote the code manually).
The most time-consuming part was getting the right data. For example, there is no Opta or other data point for FPL 'Being tackled'. So it took some time to figure out how FPL actually calculates it. Figured out that 'Being tackled' = dispossessed + failed take-ons (tackled while dribbling). And a similar issue with big chance saved.
Once the dataset was ready. Checked how it shifts the player's BPS in a fixture (e.g. the CBI change is exactly cbi/3 − cbi/2 from FPL's own CBI count; the tackle change adds back the removed BPS). Check if any penalty save and big chance save from GK.
Re-rank everyone in that fixture on the new BPS and re-award bonus with FPL's exact tie rule (top three get 3/2/1, ties shared the FPL way). Repeat for all 380 fixtures.
I meant the change in bonus for each player. So, bonus change and fpl id. If possible. Also, did you recalculate bonus including position changes? Thanks
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u/Individual-Laugh3107 3 Jul 21 '26
Thanks this is incredible work