Mohammed Salah and Sadio Mane have been in fine form this season, with the 30 goals they have scored between them propelling Liverpool to record-breaking success.
Furthermore Salah has earned more FPL points than anybody else so far this season and Mane is only three behind second-placed Kevin De Bruyne.
Those points don’t come cheaply though – the Reds pair are the two most expensive options in the game and, as such, it is hard to accommodate both in your squad.
We have analysed a sample of more than 250 managers with five or more top 10,000 finishes to get some clues as to whether you should opt for Salah, Mane, both or neither.
Mane in the middle
When the season got underway, the preference of the top bosses was clear – 98 per cent of them had Salah and none of them had Mane.
Even though the Egyptian scored 45 points to the Senegalese’s 40 in the first five matches of the season, a saving of £1m (as it was at the time) saw the balance of power shift to 75 per cent elite selection for Salah and 17 per cent for Mane.
The next 10 matches is where Mane’s ownership and price really started to soar, as he recorded more than twice as many points as his right-sided counterpart.
Mane was favoured by more of the elite for the first time in gameweek 12, and by their 16th match of the season there were 80 percentage points between them in Mane’s favour.
While Salah’s popularity had dipped, it was around the same point of the season that a small batch of pioneers were toying with the idea of having both men in their team.
A 5 per cent backing of the duo in gameweek 14 grew to 31 per cent over the next eight weeks before a mammoth 65 per cent employed both men for Liverpool’s double gameweek in late January.
An injury to Mane in the first of those two matches left a sour taste in the mouths of many managers and, in the five weeks since then, no more than 2 per cent of elites have gone for the former Southampton man without also picking his more expensive teammate.
In gameweek 28, over a third of the very best selected both players, with around twice as many choosing just Salah, a small handful opting for just Mane and one lone renegade amongst the 250 strong sample going into battle with neither man.
What should you do?
It’s all well and good looking at the selection patterns of decorated managers, but are there any hints in the underlying numbers as to why who you should prioritise as the season reaches the business end?
Salah has only outscored Mane in five of their last 10 matches (with both men collecting the same number of points in one of the remaining five) but his scores in the ICT Index have been better than his teammate’s on all 10 occasions.
The ‘C’ of ICT stands for Creativity, which measures the goalscoring opportunities a player creates, with analysis showing that a player scores around 100 Creativity for every assist they register.
The ‘T’ stands for Threat, which is used to assess potential goals as creativity is used to assess potential assists.
If we add up all the Threat and Creativity accrued by each of Salah and Mane in their past 10 league appearances, Salah comes out with 67.6 Threat per game and 28.1 Creativity per game, while Mane scores just 40.5 Threat per game and 16.84 Creativity per game.
In terms of expected attacking returns then, Salah is clearly in better form with an expected 42.2 FPL points from attacking contributions in his past 10 appearances, compared to Mane’s 25.3 points.
It therefore looks as though the elite have got this one right on this occasion, with Salah appearing the more in-form player of the two.
