Most of the coverage of this year's FPL rule changes tells you what changed. This is an attempt to tell you what it costs, by running the new rules back over last season's match data.
What changed, briefly
The Bonus Points System. Three specific edits:
- Clearances, blocks and interceptions (CBI) now earn 1 BPS per three actions, up from one per two.
- The −1 BPS penalty for being tackled has been removed.
- Goalkeepers no longer earn 2 BPS for saves outside the box, and a penalty save drops from 8 BPS to 7.
Everything else in scoring is stable. Defensive contribution points are unchanged — 2 points for a defender reaching 10 clearances, blocks, interceptions and tackles, or a midfielder or forward reaching 12 including ball recoveries. Chips are unchanged: two sets of four, first set expiring at the Gameweek 19 deadline, 13:30 GMT on Saturday 2 January. You can still bank five free transfers, and there are no bonus December transfers this year because there is no Africa Cup of Nations.
New features, not rules: live points and live mini-league tables during matches, projected bonus from the 20-minute mark, an official price-change predictor, a guided squad-selection assistant, and a later lockdown at 09:00 the day after a gameweek's final match.
The problem FPL was solving
Defensive actions were paying twice. The same clearance could push a defender over the DefCon threshold for 2 points and feed their BPS score toward a bonus point.
We checked how often that actually happened in 2025/26, across every match in our database:
| Position | Matches hitting DefCon | Also earned bonus | Share | Distinct players |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Defenders | 821 | 159 | 19.4% | 83 |
| Midfielders | 587 | 123 | 21.0% | 59 |
| Forwards | 9 | 2 | 22.2% | 2 |
So roughly one in five DefCon matches also returned bonus. The overlap was real — and marginally worse for midfielders than for defenders, which is worth noting given the fix targets CBI, a defender-weighted metric.
Who the CBI change actually costs
Here is the part you cannot get from a press release. For every player, we recalculated their 2025/26 BPS under the new one-per-three rule and compared it to what they actually earned.
| Player | Pos | Season CBI | BPS lost | As % of their BPS | 2026/27 price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marcos Senesi | DEF | 357 | −63 | 11.0% | £6.0m |
| Virgil van Dijk | DEF | 329 | −59 | 9.9% | £6.5m |
| Nikola Milenković | DEF | 281 | −55 | 13.7% | £5.5m |
| Maxence Lacroix | DEF | 310 | −55 | 10.4% | £6.0m |
| James Tarkowski | DEF | 325 | −54 | 9.1% | £6.0m |
| Omar Alderete | DEF | 280 | −52 | 13.0% | £5.0m |
Every player in the top twelve is a centre-back. That is the change working as intended.
The awkward part is the pricing. Senesi loses more BPS than anyone in the league under the new rule — and FPL raised his price by £1.5m. Tarkowski loses 54 BPS and went up £0.5m. The profile FPL charged more for is the profile whose secondary income it just cut.
How much does this actually matter?
Less than the table makes it look, and we would rather say that than oversell our own analysis.
BPS is not points. It is the ranking mechanism that decides which three players in a match get 3, 2 and 1 bonus points. Losing 63 BPS across a 38-game season is roughly 1.7 BPS per match — enough to lose a close bonus race occasionally, not enough to change who a player fundamentally is. Senesi still scored 175 points last season and the DefCon points that drove most of that are untouched.
There is also a second-order effect we cannot model: everyone's CBI-derived BPS falls at once. Bonus is a relative contest, so if every centre-back in a match loses the same proportion, the winner may not change at all. Our figures show the change in raw BPS, not the change in bonus points won — computing that properly would mean re-running every match's bonus race, which we have not done.
Treat this as a directional signal about which player profiles got quietly worse, not as a points forecast.
Who gets better
The removal of the −1 for being tackled is the change nobody is talking about, and it is a straightforward gift to players who carry the ball. Wingers and attacking full-backs were being penalised for the exact action that makes them dangerous. We cannot quantify it: FPL's data feed gives us tackles made, not times tackled, so the input to that calculation is not in our database. An honest gap rather than a guess.
Goalkeepers are the mixed case. Losing 2 BPS for saves outside the box hurts keepers at busy defences who accumulate volume saves; the new "save from a big chance" metric is meant to compensate by rewarding difficulty over quantity. Which keepers come out ahead depends on shot quality data we do not currently store.
What we'd watch
The interesting question this season is whether defender points concentrate further into the fixture-proof, high-volume centre-backs, or whether the BPS haircut plus higher prices pushes value back toward attacking full-backs — who gain from the tackled-penalty removal and were never big CBI earners anyway.
We'll know by about Gameweek 10, and we'll publish it either way. Every defensive metric behind this piece is sortable in the Player Explorer, and the Trends page shows who is producing relative to their ownership.
Part of the FPL 2026/27 pre-season guide.