Who To Pick From Bournemouth

Drafting from Bournemouth

Bournemouth are a tidy 80 with a spread of four, which puts them among the flatter squads in the game without matching Newcastle's three. Twenty-six players, two of them elite, and a top five that runs 82, 82, 81, 81, 80: Djordje Petrović in goal, Tyler Adams in front of the back four, Justin Kluivert on the left, Evanilson through the middle and Bafodé Diakité at centre-half. No cliff edge, no summit. Tenth on power and it feels precisely tenth.

Read the group numbers, though, and one line jumps out. Bournemouth's best position is defensive midfield at 82, and that group contains one player. Tyler Adams is not the head of a strong department, he is the department. Land him and you have the best thing this club owns; miss him and the position falls to whoever is nominally covering it. Set against that, the centre-halves number five and average 73, the weakest group at the club, which is an awkward pair of facts to hold at once: the position with the most bodies is the position with the least quality, and Diakité's 80 is doing a great deal of lifting on his own.

That decides the legend. Nathan Ake at 90 is a centre-half, and he is seventeen points above the average of the group he would be joining, which is the largest single repair available to a Bournemouth eleven. Dominic Solanke at 91 and Callum Wilson at 90 are the better forwards, but Evanilson at 81 already gives you a usable one and neither of them touches the back four. Seven Englishmen, three Frenchmen, two Serbs and two Brazilians round out a squad you draft for its floor, not its ceiling.