Fantasy football bonuses and penalties: the full table

The table almost everyone uses

The common convention is: goal +3, assist +1, yellow card −0.5, red card −1, penalty saved +3, penalty missed −3, own goal −2, goal conceded by the keeper −1.

These are added to the player's mark, almost always between 4 and 8. The result is the player's score, and the sum of eleven scores is the team's total for the round.

None of these numbers is compulsory. They are a convention that makes leagues comparable, not a rule of the game: changing them is legitimate, as long as it is done before matchday one and written down.

The goal: why it is worth three

Three points is, in practice, the distance between a poor performance and a very good one. A forward on 5 who scores ends on 8: a goal turns around one player's day without deciding the team's on its own.

Raising a goal to 4 or 5 shifts the whole balance towards forwards, and therefore towards the auction: if goals are worth more, strikers cost more and the rest of the squad matters less.

Some leagues reward a defender's goal with a higher bonus, usually +4. It has a logic, and the side effect of making set-piece defenders worth buying.

The assist: the line worth checking twice

The assist is worth +1 and is the most disputed line of all, for a simple reason: attributing it is a judgement call. Different editorial teams decide differently.

Many leagues drop it for exactly that reason. Dropping it makes the game less rich but more objective: only events that cannot be interpreted remain.

If you keep it, write down which source is authoritative. The "that was clearly an assist" argument mid-season is never won.

Cards: half a point that decides matches

A yellow card costs half a point and is the most frequently forgotten line, because it feels irrelevant. Across eleven players, three or four cards make two points — and near a threshold, two points are a goal.

A red costs one point and almost always comes with a low mark, so the real damage is double. Some leagues take it to −2, which is defensible.

One detail: a player sent off for two yellows takes both penalties in nearly every convention. It is not arbitrary double punishment, it is the sum of two things that actually happened.

The keeper: the role with different maths

A conceded goal costs −1 and counts once per goal, not once in total. A keeper on 5 conceding three ends on 2, the heaviest penalty in the game.

This makes the keeper the only role where the real team matters more than the player. An excellent keeper behind a bad defence is worth less than an average one in a side that concedes little.

A saved penalty is worth +3, like a goal, and is the only way a keeper has a striker's day. It is also the rarest event in the table: no strategy should depend on it.

Some leagues add a clean-sheet bonus, usually +1. It makes the role less passive and is worth considering if keepers are bought reluctantly in your league.

The lines best not added

Every year someone proposes bonuses for shots on target, distance covered, recoveries. They share one problem: they depend on statistics not every source publishes the same way, and nobody wants to look them up each week.

The practical rule: a bonus is worth having only if whoever keeps the accounts can verify it in thirty seconds. Everything else becomes, after three rounds, a written rule nobody applies.

To enrich the game without heavier accounting, work on modifiers — defence, keeper, captain — rather than on individual actions: they are calculated once per team, not eleven times.