Nick Pope

PitchKeep Take · The Premier

Nick Pope is a goalkeeper for Newcastle, age 34, £5.0m. The Premier ranks him 305th overall by splitting Sleeper BPL 2025 (#42, 176.0 points) with the consensus of 5 other boards (104.5). Last year's Sleeper line ran 62 spots ahead of the expert/FPL mix. The third list keeps some of that production bump and refuses to throw the other boards out. That is the whole point of not just republishing The Pitch.

The 2025/26 line is 27 starts, 2416 minutes, 89 saves, 7 clean sheets and 38 goals against. Official FPL scored it at 96 points (3.6 per match) with 3 bonus. Sleeper's table turned the same counting stats into 176.0. Keepers get 8 a clean sheet, 2 a save, and −2 a goal against. That is a different sport than FPL's 10-from-saves cap, and it is why this board ranks them at all.

Underlying: 0.16 xG, 0.0 xA, 0.16 xGI. The job is shot-stopping volume in front of whatever Newcastle is this year. 89 saves is the Sleeper case. 7 clean sheets is the FPL case. If the back line leaks, both numbers move together and this ranking goes with them. The friendliest board is FPL EP Next at 36; the coldest is FPL xGI at 331.

Market: £5.0m, 6 boards on the file. Price is the FPL tax, not the rank. The Premier is who produced and who the boards still believe. FPL's own EP-next is 2.6. ICT 70.7.

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: Tijjani Reijnders, Ferdi Kadıoğlu, Diogo Dalot Teixeira. Versus The Pitch (Sleeper-only #42), the hybrid moves him down to #305. That move is the third list doing its job.

Age 34 is not a moral failing and it is not invisible. Youth-lean boards (The Athletic-style remap on this board) push him down; veteran-rating boards (WhoScored, SofaScore) keep him up. The Premier averages those instincts instead of pretending a 34-year-old goalkeeper is 24. If you need a three-year window, look younger. If you need 2026/27, he just played 2416 minutes and that still counts.

You start one goalkeeper. That positional cap is why The Premier will not put a saves leader in the overall top ten unless the consensus also shows up. Pope's Sleeper line (176.0) already made The Pitch. The other boards (104.5) decide how far the hybrid lets him climb. Draft him as a keeper, not as an outfielder who happens to have gloves.

How to use the file: The Pitch is the Sleeper-only 400 (he is #42 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.