The 2026/27 Fantasy Premier League game is live and the Gameweek 1 deadline is 18:30 BST on Friday 21 August. Because the season starts a week later than usual — the fixture list had to clear 33 days from the World Cup final — you have close to four weeks to build a first squad. That is roughly double the usual window.
This is the hub for that window. Each section is the short version; where there's a full analysis behind it, it's linked. We'll keep revising this page as pre-season news lands.
The calendar
| Game live | 23 July 2026 |
| GW1 deadline | Friday 21 August, 18:30 BST |
| First match | Arsenal v Coventry City, 20:00 |
| First chip set expires | GW19 — 13:30 GMT, Saturday 2 January |
| Season ends | Sunday 30 May 2027 |
What actually changed
The chips did not change: two sets of four — Wildcard, Free Hit, Triple Captain, Bench Boost — with the first set expiring at the Gameweek 19 deadline. You can still bank up to five free transfers. There are no extra December free transfers this season, because there is no Africa Cup of Nations in the window.
What did change is the Bonus Points System, and it changed in a way that is aimed squarely at defenders:
- Clearances, blocks and interceptions now earn 1 BPS per three, not per two.
- The −1 BPS for being tackled is gone, which helps players who dribble.
- Goalkeepers no longer get 2 BPS for saves outside the box; penalty saves drop from 8 BPS to 7.
The stated reason is overlap: defensive actions were feeding both a player's defensive contribution points and their bonus points. We checked that against our own 2025/26 data. Of the 821 matches in which a defender hit the 10-action DefCon threshold, 159 also returned bonus points — 19.4%, across 83 different defenders. For midfielders it was 21.0%. The overlap was real, and it was slightly worse for midfielders than defenders.
There are also new features rather than rule changes: live points and live mini-league updates during matches, projected bonus after 20 minutes, an official price-change predictor, and a squad-selection assistant. The gameweek lockdown moves later, to 09:00 the day after the final match.
Read the full analysis: what actually changed in FPL 2026/27 →
The shape of the prices
There are 558 players in the game. The price ceilings by position tell you most of what you need to know about the market:
| Position | Cheapest | Most expensive |
|---|---|---|
| Goalkeeper | £4.0m | £6.0m |
| Defender | £4.0m | £8.0m |
| Midfielder | £4.5m | £12.0m |
| Forward | £4.5m | £15.5m |
Erling Haaland at £15.5m is the most expensive player in FPL history. Bruno Fernandes at £12.0m is the only other player above £9.5m — down from five players last season. With Mohamed Salah gone from the league, the old question of how many premiums you can fit has become a question about one.
At the other end, every single defender at Coventry, Hull and Ipswich is priced at exactly £4.0m — 27 players, no exceptions.
Defenders in general got more expensive, and specifically the ones who rack up defensive contributions did. Which sets up the season's neatest tension, covered below.
Read the full analysis: the 2026/27 prices, ranked by value →
The DefCon squeeze
FPL raised the price of defensive-contribution specialists and, in the same announcement, reduced the bonus points those actions generate.
Marcos Senesi is the clearest case. He rose £1.5m to £6.0m on the back of a 175-point season. He also made 357 clearances, blocks and interceptions in 2025/26 — more than anyone. Under the new one-per-three rule those same actions would have yielded 63 fewer BPS, which is 11.0% of his entire season's BPS total, and the largest drop of any player in the league.
That is not a reason to avoid him. Defensive contribution points are untouched, and they are the larger share of the return. But paying a raised price for a profile whose secondary income was just cut is the specific trade-off to be aware of, and it applies to Virgil van Dijk (−59 BPS), Nikola Milenković (−55) and James Tarkowski (−54) too.
You can see every player's defensive numbers in the Player Explorer.
The opening fixtures
From our fixture data, average difficulty across the first five gameweeks:
| Club | Avg FDR, GW1–5 |
|---|---|
| Liverpool | 2.60 |
| Leeds | 2.80 |
| Man City | 2.80 |
| Man Utd | 2.80 |
| Spurs | 2.80 |
Nobody has a genuinely soft opening — 2.60 is a kind run, not a free one. The Fixture Ticker has all 20 clubs across any window you choose, blanks and doubles included.
Eight new managers
This is the part no model handles well, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Eight clubs start the season with a new manager, including Liverpool (Andoni Iraola), Chelsea (Xabi Alonso) and Manchester City (Enzo Maresca, replacing Pep Guardiola).
Our expected-points model is fitted on what players and teams have actually done. It has no way of knowing that a new manager will move a full-back forward, drop a striker, or change a penalty order. In August it is working from last season's evidence about a league that has partly rearranged itself — so treat early projections as a starting point with a wider error bar than usual, and expect them to sharpen as gameweeks accumulate. We publish how the model works and where it fails for exactly this reason.
Building the first draft
There is no single correct first squad, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing with confidence. What we can show you is what everyone else is doing: live ownership across the whole game, updated daily, so you can see what the template is forming around before the deadline rather than after it.
Read the full analysis: what the first squads are actually picking →
The tools that help here:
- Assistant Manager — ranked model picks and a squad optimiser that finds the best legal £100.0m side.
- Drafts — build a squad for any future gameweek and see what each plan costs in transfers and hits.
- Trends — the differential finder: who is producing that nobody owns.
Getting set up
Choose a team name, join some mini-leagues, and — if you want somewhere to argue about captaincy on a Saturday morning — join ours.
Read: team names, mini-leagues and getting set up → · Join the community →
Everything on this site is free. Every number in this guide comes from a query against our own database, not from a press release — if we can't query it, we don't write it.