PITCHKEEP

PitchKeep Take

Ephron Mason-Clark is #232 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 midfielder who scores FPL points from the middle of the pitch, not just the box at Coventry City. The number is not a vibe. It is the average of every board that ranked him (2 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: 0 FPL points, 0 goals, 0 assists, 0 minutes, ICT 0, xGI 0. That is the 2025/26 tape, not a projection dressed up as a memory. The 2026/27 market then reprices him at £5.5m with 0.1% 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 100, 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 173.0. High 150, low 196 — 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 Ephron Mason-Clark 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. The FPL news line right now: Hamstring injury - 75% chance of playing That is a minutes flag, not a character study.

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.