Who To Pick From Crystal Palace

Drafting from Crystal Palace

Crystal Palace give you a big squad, 29 players. What that squad does not give you is a top end: a power rating of 80, tenth on power in a crowded tie, a best-XI spread of 4, and 1 player rated 82 or above. Read the flatness as timing rather than weakness. When the eleventh-best man sits that close to the best, Palace keep handing you startable bodies in rounds where the big clubs have long since run dry, so nothing here has to be an early pick.

The pick is Adam Wharton at 82, the one man here who lifts an XI on rating alone, and the reason to take him the first time round is that there is nothing behind him. Central midfield is the weakest department at the club, seven of them averaging 73, and the next-best after Wharton is Will Hughes at 74. That is the argument for him rather than an objection to him: the wheel will not come back with a second controller from this club, and the drafter who waits gets Hughes.

What you give up by spending that visit on a midfielder is the forward line, and it is the best thing the club owns: Jean-Philippe Mateta and Evann Guessand at 81 apiece, four strikers who average 79 between them, with Ismaïla Sarr at 80 wide right and Daichi Kamada at 80 in the hole behind. Dean Henderson at 80 is a real goalkeeper too, though a keeper at that level turns up at half the clubs on the wheel and is the easiest thing on this list to replace later. So if your XI already has a controller and a hole at nine, invert all of the above and take Mateta, or Guessand if the Ivory Coast link is the one you are leaning on.

Where the depth genuinely is not is right back, a department of one in Óscar Mingueza at 78, so do not plan on filling that slot twice from here. Centre-back is the reverse, seven bodies deep behind Chris Richards and Axel Disasi at 79, and still nothing in it that changes a defence. The passport count is the other thing worth building around: 9 of the 29 are English, no other nation on the books musters more than three, and Wharton, Henderson, Mitchell and McNeil come out of one club for an England-chemistry XI. One last note if you draft with legends in play: Wilfried Zaha at 93 heads Palace's card from the left wing, and the top of that card sits in the nineties, a different game from the 82 the current squad tops out at.