PITCHKEEP

PitchKeep Take

Daniel Ballard is #84 on PitchKeep's The Pitch — a 24-source Premier League super-aggregate built for 2026/27 FPL and for anyone who still argues about who actually belongs in a season-long XI. He is a defender in the new FPL world where attacking full-backs and set-piece centre-halves print at Sunderland. The number is not a vibe. It is the average of every board that ranked him (16 of 24), led by official FPL 2025/26 points, 2026/27 price, Gameweek 1 ownership, ICT, xGI, and the August expert tapes from Premier League Scout, Fantasy Football Fix, Yahoo, and the rest of the public desk. Unranked sources are skipped. We do not invent a 999 to punish a name the Athletic did not print.

Last season's counting stats are the floor: 116 FPL points, 2 goals, 2 assists, 2144 minutes, ICT 121.5, xGI 3.09. That is the 2025/26 tape, not a projection dressed up as a memory. The 2026/27 market then reprices him at £5.0m with 4.8% ownership into the Friday 18:30 BST Gameweek 1 deadline. If those two stories diverge — cheap with a monster year, or expensive off a quiet one — The Pitch is the place the split shows up as a rank instead of a tweet. BK Value on this slot is 1,374, the same decaying curve as football and baseball: 12,000 at 1.01, a late-board name a fraction of that.

The 24-board average is 90.69. High 71, low 168 — that gap is the argument. Premium desks (price, Hub, Sky) stuff the £9m+ names because FPL is a constrained budget game and those shirts are the ones everyone else already owns. Value desks (Scout lean, Faithful gems, Yahoo enablers) try to find the £4.5m–£6.5m minutes that let you afford Haaland and Bruno in the same XI. If Daniel Ballard is climbing one of those and falling off the other, you are not confused. You are looking at two sports that happen to share a fixture list.

The Pitch is not FIFA overall and it is not a beauty contest. He is 26, which still matters when the World Cup summer just emptied the legs. It is who you would actually pick in a 15-man FPL squad and who you would actually keep in a season-long draft if the £100m cap vanished. Those two games disagree at the edges — draft loves 180-point midfielders even at £8m; classic FPL sometimes prefers the £5.5m enabler so the rest of the money can sit on Haaland's shoulders. No injury flag on the FPL ticker this morning, which is the whole scouting report until Saturday.

Watch the clip. Then look at the board dump. If the film is a 1.01 and The Pitch has him in the thirties, somebody is late or you are early. Refresh this file with the next Gameweek. Flags fly forever; FPL ranks do not. We will rebuild The Pitch the same way we rebuild The Keep: more boards when they exist, honest about compiled expert slices, and never pretending a podcast XI is a 250-man sheet.