PITCHKEEP

PitchKeep Take · The Premier

Habib Diarra is a midfielder for Sunderland, age 22, £5.5m. The Premier ranks him 226th overall by splitting Sleeper BPL 2025 (#204, 67.8 points) with the consensus of 6 other boards (205.5). Production and the industry almost agree, which is rarer than it looks on a 24-source mix. When both sides land in the same band, The Premier stops arguing and prints the number.

The 2025/26 Premier League line is 15 starts and 1403 minutes, 2 goals and 6 assists, 14 tackles and 17 CBI. Official FPL scored it at 65 points (3.2 per match) with 3 bonus. Sleeper's table turned the same counting stats into 67.8. Midfielders get 9 a goal, 6 an assist, and 1 a clean sheet, plus a full tackle/CBI stream. That is why a six who plays every week can outrank a ten-goal winger who sits.

Underlying: 3.27 xG, 0.85 xA, 4.12 xGI and 5.2 above expected assists. Set pieces: first-choice penalties for Sunderland. Role at Sunderland is the 2026/27 question sitting under the 2025/26 number. 15 starts is a starter. Anything under 25 starts is a rotation warning we already priced. Minutes are the skill that survives a finishing regression. The friendliest board is FPL xGI at 129; the coldest is FPL ICT Index at 237.

Market: £5.5m, 0.1% owned into the 2026/27 FPL start, 7 boards on the file. That ownership is a leftover. Either the public missed a real season or the public correctly decided the role is not repeatable. The Premier's rank is our vote. If we have him inside the first 80 and they have him at 0.4%, that is a Sleeper buy. FPL's own EP-next is 2.0. ICT 53.9.

Instruction: he is on the 400, which is already a statement, and he is not a star. Stash in Sleeper if the minutes are real. Do not let a Pitch screenshot make you start him over a Premier top-80. Nearby on The Premier: Nicolás Domínguez, Jacob Ramsey, Josh King. Versus The Pitch (Sleeper-only #204), the hybrid moves him down to #226. That move is the third list doing its job.

Age 22 is the other half of a hybrid. The 2025/26 counting line is one season. The Athletic-style youth lean on this desk exists specifically so a Sunderland kid does not get stuck behind a 32-year-old who had a nice bonus year. Sleeper still has to see the minutes. 15 starts is the beginning of a case, not the end of one.

How to use the file: The Pitch is the Sleeper-only 400 (he is #204 there). The Premier is the 50/50 with every other board we track. Attack, Midfield, Defence, and Keepers re-rank the same Sleeper table by position. BK Value on this page follows The Premier when you are on the hybrid calculator and The Pitch when you are on the Sleeper calculator. Same curve either way — 12,000 at 1.01. 6 yellows are a real Sleeper tax. Unranked sources are skipped, never treated as 999, which is why a player missing from Yahoo's XI is not secretly ranked 400th.