Who To Pick From Man City

Drafting from Man City

Manchester City are second on power at 89, a single point behind Arsenal, and they hold the one number every drafter should care about: 20 elite players, more than any other club in the league. That is the whole case for taking City picks early and often. Very little of this squad is wasted on you.

Erling Haaland at 96 is the headline, and he is not up there alone. City's striker group averages 92 across two players, the best position group in the entire league, and the one place on the wheel where you can draft close to blind and still be right. Behind him Rúben Dias is a 92 at centre-back, Joško Gvardiol a 90 alongside him and Gianluigi Donnarumma a 90 in goal. Thirty players, a spread of 10, eleven of them English.

The trap is the goalkeeper. Gianluigi Donnarumma is a 90 and the fourth-best player at the club, yet City's keeping group as a whole averages 77 across three. Take Donnarumma or take nothing. The two men behind him drag that average down hard, and there is no version of a City goalkeeper pick that works if it is not him.

For a legend, Kevin De Bruyne at 97 is the spend, and not out of nostalgia. Look again at the top five: a striker, a holding midfielder, two centre-backs and a keeper. There is no creative central midfielder anywhere in it. Nico González covers the base of the midfield and covers nothing ahead of it. De Bruyne is the highest-rated midfielder in City's legend pool, level on 97 with Sergio Agüero, and he plugs the one genuine structural gap in a squad that does not have many. Agüero would only be gilding the strikers, and the strikers are already the best group going.