# The Consensus XI: the squad the crowd would build

> Seven expert sources, one mention-tally, the majority captain — 60.74 projected points of pure template.

By the evmax model · 21 August 2026 · https://evmax.ai/fpl/gw1/consensus-squad/

This squad contains no opinion of ours. We tallied the recommended squads and picks across seven expert sources, kept the most-mentioned player for every slot, made the result legal under the £100.0m budget and the three-per-club cap, and gave the armband to the majority pick. That is the whole method. Where our model disagrees with the crowd, this squad sides with the crowd — that is its job.

So Haaland leads it, at 75.2% ownership the most-owned player in the game, captained for a projected 15.61 doubled. B.Fernandes (8.85 expected points, the board's top projection) plays alongside him rather than instead of him. The defence is the template's: Mosquera (4.36), Calafiori (5.12 — quietly the best value in the entire game at 0.931 points per million) and Shaw (3.98), with Verbruggen (3.34) in goal.

> The gap to our Model XI is 5.18 projected points. The season will tell us whether that gap was real or an artefact of our own assumptions.

Two honesty notes. First, the projections above come from our engine, and our engine initially rated several of these players as rotation risks purely because of their price rank — the crowd insisted they start, so their minutes here come from sourced research notes derived from that same expert corpus. If the experts are right about line-ups, this squad's true projection is higher than the headline. Second, Groß (3.33) and Sangaré (2.41) carry the widest uncertainty: the model and the crowd disagree most about exactly these picks.

The bench — Kinsky, Hume, Calvert-Lewin, Diop — is the template's playing bench, and João Pedro (4.04) completes the forward line as the third-most-owned player in the game. Nothing here is clever. That is the point: this is the baseline every fancy model, ours included, has to beat.

**Bottom line:** The Consensus XI projects 60.74 points with Haaland captained — the crowd's squad, followed faithfully, published and scored every week against our Model XI.

**Bottom line:** The Consensus XI projects 60.74 points with Haaland captained — the crowd's squad, followed faithfully, published and scored every week against our Model XI.

## The data

| # | Player | Team | xPts | Ceiling | Captain EV | Pts/m |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Verbruggen | BHA | 3.34 | 8.04 | 6.68 | 0.74 |
| 2 | Mosquera | ARS | 4.36 | 9.36 | 8.72 | 0.79 |
| 3 | Calafiori | ARS | 5.12 | 13.88 | 10.24 | 0.93 |
| 4 | Shaw | MUN | 3.98 | 7.99 | 7.95 | 0.88 |
| 5 | B.Fernandes | MUN | 8.85 | 19.70 | 17.70 | 0.74 |
| 6 | Mbeumo | MUN | 5.00 | 14.83 | 10.00 | 0.62 |
| 7 | Szoboszlai | LIV | 4.71 | 12.49 | 9.43 | 0.67 |
| 8 | Groß | BHA | 3.33 | 9.42 | 6.65 | 0.60 |
| 9 | Sangaré | NFO | 2.41 | 6.53 | 4.81 | 0.48 |
| 10 | Haaland | MCI | 7.80 | 17.31 | 15.61 | 0.50 |
| 11 | João Pedro | CHE | 4.04 | 11.48 | 8.08 | 0.54 |
| 12 | Kinsky | TOT | 2.50 | 6.54 | 5.00 | 0.56 |
| 13 | Hume | SUN | 3.24 | 9.10 | 6.48 | 0.72 |
| 14 | Calvert-Lewin | LEE | 3.97 | 11.68 | 7.95 | 0.66 |
| 15 | Diop | IPS | 3.23 | 10.28 | 6.45 | 0.81 |

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Method: Market odds (de-vigged) → Dixon-Coles scorelines → 50k Monte-Carlo simulations, scored on the official Fantasy Premier League points table.
Data license: CC BY 4.0 (attribution: evmax, https://evmax.ai). Machine-readable JSON: https://evmax.ai/api/fpl/gw1/consensus-squad.json