Guide · 4 min read

Price rises, falls and the sell-on fee

Everyone starts with £100.0m. By spring, the teams around you are worth anything from £98m to £108m, and the gap looks like it should matter enormously. Sometimes it does. Here's how to tell.

The starting position

The game gives every new team a budget of £100.0m for a fifteen-player squad, with a limit of three players from any one club; both figures are in the game's own settings. Team value is what the game would give you for all fifteen players if you sold them now, plus whatever is in the bank. It moves for two reasons: your players' prices change, and you make transfers.

How prices move

Player prices rise and fall by £0.1m at a time, driven by the balance of managers transferring a player in and out. The game processes price changes once a day; the change times in its data are set at 23:00 UTC. So a player being bought heavily on a Saturday afternoon won't rise until that night, and by then the deadline may have passed. The mechanism is the game's own and it doesn't publish the exact thresholds, which is why the various prediction sites disagree with each other at the margins.

The sell-on fee

This is the rule most managers half-know. When you sell a player whose price has risen since you bought him, you don't receive the full current price. You receive your purchase price plus half of the rise; the game's settings put the sell-on fee at 50%. Falls are not halved. If he's dropped, you get the new lower price in full.

Worked example. You buy a midfielder at £7.0m. Three weeks later he's £7.4m. His selling price for you is £7.2m: your £7.0m plus half of the £0.4m rise. Someone who buys him today at £7.4m and sells tomorrow at £7.4m loses nothing, but you can never realise the whole rise. Now suppose he falls instead, to £6.8m. You sell at £6.8m and take the whole loss. Rises are half yours; falls are all yours.

When a rise is an odd number of tenths, the halving lands between two prices and the game decides the rounding. Check the selling price the game shows you rather than working it out. The game does that arithmetic, not you.

What team value actually buys

Team value is only useful when it's spent. Its worth is the upgrade it lets you make that a poorer team can't. A team valued at £102.5m can hold roughly one player a tier above what a £100.0m team can, a £7.5m midfielder instead of a £5.0m one, say. Whether that upgrade is worth two points a week or half a point depends entirely on who the two players are, and that, not the headline figure, is the real return on your team value.

It also has diminishing returns. The first £2m of extra value lets you upgrade a starter. The next £2m upgrades a rotation option. After that, extra money tends to sit in the bank or fund a bench nobody needs, and a £108m team with £3m unspent is functionally a £105m team.

Why chasing rises is a trap

Because you only keep half a rise, a £0.1m rise is worth £0.05m to you at sale, and you can't spend half a tenth, so it only matters once several accumulate. Taking a 4-point hit to buy a player a day early "before he rises" spends 4 real points to capture £0.05m of value. Moving a transfer forward a week to beat a rise costs you whatever the outgoing player would have scored that week. Almost every price-driven decision is a real cost paid for a tiny, halved, unspendable gain.

The exception is the Wildcard. When you rebuild the entire squad, your selling prices are your budget, and a squad full of risers gives you a bigger one. Even then, remember the fee: a team that's risen £4m on paper has about £2m of it to spend.

Free Hit and team value

A Free Hit reverts your squad completely at the end of the gameweek, and your team value with it. Nothing you buy or sell in a Free Hit week affects your prices or your bank afterwards. That makes it the one week you can ignore value entirely. Every FPL chip explained covers what the other chips do to your squad.

The habit worth keeping

Once a week, before the deadline, look at what your team value would actually let you do differently. If the answer is "nothing this week", the number is irrelevant to your decisions and you should stop watching it. If the answer is "swap two mid-priced players for a premium", that's a genuine option worth weighing against the fixture list. Value is a tool for building a better eleven, not a scoreboard.

The transfers that spend your value are the subject of Free transfers, rolling them, and when a hit pays for itself. And if a rival's team is worth £3m more than yours and they're still behind, the Rivalry Report will show you where the money went. Start the comparison.