A position change is one of the quietest ways a player's Fantasy value can shift overnight. Nothing about how he actually plays needs to be different — the same touches, the same fixtures, the same manager trusting him in the same role — but the points he earns for exactly that output can change completely depending on which box FPL ticks next to his name. The Premier League has confirmed 11 players reclassified for 2026/27, and a few of them are genuinely worth knowing about before you finalise a squad, not just a piece of trivia for the WhatsApp group.
Moving Into Midfield: The Shifts Managers Should Be Happiest About
Here's the scenario worth picturing first. Last season, Kroupi scored 13 goals in 33 appearances for Bournemouth, playing just off centre-forward Evanilson in a No.10 role — genuinely one of the most efficient finishers in the league, with a goal every 134 minutes, more than 50 minutes quicker than Antoine Semenyo's 188.2-minute rate, itself the fastest among regular midfield starters last season. None of that mattered for clean sheets, though, because FPL had him down as a forward. For 2026/27, he's officially a midfielder. Same player, same manager, same position on the pitch — but now every clean sheet Bournemouth keep hands him an extra 1 point on top of goals that are worth exactly what a midfielder's goals are worth, not a forward's. That's a real value shift for doing absolutely nothing differently. His underlying output holds up under scrutiny too — see our xG and xGI explainer for exactly how to read a goal record like his.
Dorgu is the second real case. He started last season as a Manchester United defender, but once Michael Carrick took charge from Gameweek 22, he was used as a left winger instead — limited to just three starts under the new manager, and he scored in every single one of them, including goals against Arsenal and Manchester City and a goal-and-assist performance against Brighton. His underlying numbers back up the eye test: his 33.2 minutes per shot was the fastest of United's attacking trio alongside Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo, and he matched Cunha's tally of three big chances despite playing over 800 fewer minutes. If Carrick keeps deploying him that way over a full season, being scored as a midfielder rather than a defender is an entirely different proposition — attacking returns that used to count for less now count for exactly what they're worth.
Three more moved the same direction for less dramatic but still relevant reasons: Lewis-Skelly at Arsenal, Bogarde at Aston Villa, and Lewis-Potter at Brentford all move from defender to midfielder — the same underlying logic as Dorgu's case, at less established price points, worth a look if any of the three are seeing genuine minutes in an advanced role for their club this season.
Moving Out of Midfield: A Mixed Bag
Not every reclassification is a straightforward upgrade. Marmoush moves the opposite way at Manchester City — midfielder to forward — after Pep Guardiola used him as an out-and-out striker for most of last season, scoring three goals and assisting three more from that central role. The trade-off is real: he loses access to clean sheet points entirely as a forward, but a City striker with genuine goal threat and a premium supporting cast is still a squad-worthy asset — just evaluated on goal threat alone now rather than a blended goal-plus-clean-sheet case. Rutter at Brighton makes the same midfielder-to-forward move.
Four players move from midfielder to defender: Wieffer at Brighton, who actually played right-back for most of last season anyway, Cardines at Crystal Palace, Sessegnon at Fulham, and Da Silva Moreira at Nottingham Forest. This one is worth flagging specifically for anyone thinking about defensive contribution points: as a defender, each of these four now only needs 10 combined clearances, blocks, interceptions, and tackles to bank the DefCon bonus, rather than the higher 12-action threshold that applies to midfielders. If any of the four are genuinely defensively active in their new deeper role, that's a real, lower bar to clear — covered in full in our DefCon explainer and our guide to finding reliable DefCon scorers.
A position change costs nothing and changes nothing about how a player actually plays — which is exactly why it's one of the easiest pieces of value to miss. The player on the pitch is identical. The points he can score for the same performance are not.
The Oracle Takeaway
Eleven players were reclassified for 2026/27, and three cases stand out as genuine value shifts rather than administrative footnotes: Kroupi and Dorgu moving into midfield off the back of real underlying output, and the four players moving into defence picking up a meaningfully easier route to defensive contribution points.
Three things worth doing with this: check whether any of these 11 are already in your squad under their old position before you build around them for 2026/27, since their scoring profile has genuinely changed even if their price hasn't moved much yet. Give particular weight to Kroupi and Dorgu specifically if their underlying output this pre-season backs up last season's numbers. And if you're building a defensively-minded squad, screen the four midfielder-to-defender moves against the DefCon criteria before assuming their new position alone makes them a pick.
FPL Oracle tracks every player's current position, price, and underlying output automatically, so you're never working from a stale classification. Browse the live Player Hub to check any of these 11 in their new position, or cross-reference this against our Rising Stars piece for more 2026/27 names worth watching, or ask FPL Oracle directly whether any of these reclassified players actually fit your squad and budget.
Which of these 11 position changes are you most likely to actually build around — Kroupi, Dorgu, or one of the defensive moves? 👇