PITCHKEEP

PitchKeep Take · The Premier

Tom Cairney is a midfielder for Fulham, age 35, £5.0m. The Premier ranks him 310th overall by splitting Sleeper BPL 2025 (#295, 25.8 points) with the consensus of 3 other boards (252.67). The industry still has him 42 spots ahead of the 2025/26 Sleeper count. The Premier pays that reputation something, not everything. Brand does not outrun a down year, and a down year does not erase a player Fulham still builds around.

The 2025/26 Premier League line is 6 starts and 756 minutes, 2 goals and 0 assists, 7 tackles and 12 CBI. Official FPL scored it at 41 points (1.7 per match) with 1 bonus. Sleeper's table turned the same counting stats into 25.8. 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: 1.21 xG, 0.81 xA, 2.02 xGI. Role at Fulham is the 2026/27 question sitting under the 2025/26 number. 6 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 223; the coldest is Sleeper BPL 2025 at 295.

Market: £5.0m, 0.0% owned into the 2026/27 FPL start, 4 boards on the file. Mid-range ownership means the name is known and not fully paid. That is usually where this desk lives — not the 70% tax, not the 0.2% dart. ICT 41.4.

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. FPL flag: injured; Knee injury - Expected back 10 Oct. Nearby on The Premier: Reiss Nelson, Tosin Adarabioyo, Wilfried Gnonto. Versus The Pitch (Sleeper-only #295), the hybrid moves him down to #310. That move is the third list doing its job.

Age 35 is not a moral failing and it is not invisible. Youth-lean boards (The Athletic-style remap on this desk) push him down; veteran-rating boards (WhoScored, SofaScore) keep him up. The Premier averages those instincts instead of pretending a 35-year-old midfielder is 24. If you need a three-year window, look younger. If you need 2026/27, he just played 756 minutes and that still counts.

How to use the file: The Pitch is the Sleeper-only 400 (he is #295 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. Unranked sources are skipped, never treated as 999, which is why a player missing from Yahoo's XI is not secretly ranked 400th.