FPL 26/27 Season Preview

Spurs and Chelsea led the spending at £229.5m and £217m, and the striking thing is where the money went: into midfields and defences, not into new premium forwards. That leaves the top of the forward line exactly as it was, with Erling Haaland at £15.5m the only truly expensive number nine to argue about.

The move with the clearest squad-building consequence is Morgan Rogers to Chelsea for £117m, because he arrives priced at £7.5m in midfield, the same bracket as team-mate João Pedro. A club-record attacking midfielder in the mid-price tier is exactly the kind of pick that squeezes budgets in the wrong direction if his role takes time to settle. Aston Villa are the flipside: Rogers and Youri Tielemans out, Alejandro Garnacho in on loan and Johan Manzambi in for up to £59.5m, which means their attacking returns are being redistributed and worth watching rather than buying in GW1.

The early ownership table is shaped like a barbell. Haaland sits alone at £15.5m in three-quarters of squads, and no one else in the top ten costs more than £12m, with most of the list at £7.5m or less. Managers have committed to one huge asset and hunted for value everywhere else, right down to the goalkeeper slots, where Dubravka at £4.0m sits in a quarter of squads.

The interesting corner is midfield. Szoboszlai (£7.0m) and Rogers (£7.5m) both earned their ownership with genuinely strong seasons, and Rogers's backers are also betting those returns survive the move to Chelsea and whatever role he lands in there. High ownership is not a warning in itself; it simply means a player moves your rank with the crowd rather than against it. If you want to be different, that £7.0m to £7.5m midfield slot is where a call actually separates you; leaving out Haaland is not it.

There is no soft landing this year. Liverpool have the kindest opening run, yet only just, and the seven clubs behind them are bunched within a fraction of a point of each other. That flatness matters: nobody gets the runaway easy start that usually justifies loading up on one defence, so fixture-based planning should be about avoiding a bad start rather than chasing a great one.

Man Utd, Brentford, Spurs, Brighton and Sunderland all sit in that cluster, which supports the mid-price attackers many managers already own. The trap is Liverpool: a favourable average includes a trip to Newcastle in GW1, so a top-ranked opening run does not mean a comfortable first weekend. Equally, Sunderland and Leeds fixtures look inviting on paper without the goal threat to punish anyone.

FPL's 20 July announcements cover both live information and bonus scoring. Projected bonus now appears in players' official live scores from 20 minutes into each match, and league tables, head-to-head standings and world rank update during matches instead of overnight.

If you follow your gameweeks live in myFPL you already know the feeling; the difference is that your mini-league rivals now get it too, straight from the official app. The temptation that arrives with it is the same as ever: a live table is the perfect environment for a panic transfer on a Saturday teatime. Nothing about the points you bank has changed, so judge a pick over a run of fixtures, not over a table that will look different in twenty minutes.

Hull City, Coventry City and Ipswich Town come up in place of Wolves, Burnley and West Ham. Relegation takes some genuinely good FPL options off the board, West Ham's attackers chief among them, along with a familiar set of budget defenders, so the £4.0m and £4.5m slots that make premium squads work need rethinking rather than copying over.

Ipswich are the promoted side with an immediately usable fixture: the bookmakers can barely separate them from Sunderland at home in GW1, which makes their budget defenders and any starting attacker genuinely playable rather than pure filler. Hull, hosting Man Utd, and Coventry, away at Arsenal, are the opposite. Their assets are cheap for a reason in week one, so if you buy into them early, buy the ones you are happy to leave on the bench until the fixtures turn.

The Premier League's own Fantasy Scout has published an early fifteen, and it is worth reading as a structure as much as a shopping list. Up front it doubles down, pairing Haaland with João Pedro, one of last season's standout picks at £7.5m. In goal it takes both Spurs keepers, Kinsky and his £4.0m deputy Dubravka, a pairing that guarantees whoever starts behind a heavily reinforced defence is already in your squad. The premium midfield swing goes on Bruno Fernandes rather than spreading the money thinly.

That is the shape most managers will land on in some form: one enormous forward plus a proven mid-price partner, a keeper pairing that covers its own rotation, and three or four sub-£6m midfielders picked to play rather than to score. It was also selected before the window shuts on 1 September, so treat it as a sanity check on your budget split rather than a finished draft.

The deadline is 18:30 BST on Friday 21 August, and Arsenal host Coventry that evening with the bookmakers making them overwhelming favourites, which makes Arsenal defenders the weekend's obvious clean-sheet play.

The captaincy field is broader than one fixture. Man City at home to Bournemouth is the match the bookmakers expect to produce the most goals of the round, Man Utd are strong favourites at Hull, and between them those two games carry the armband candidates most squads already own. Everton, Brentford and Ipswich all host near coin-flips, so the opening weekend's edge sits in the handful of clear mismatches rather than spread across the fixture list.

However you play it, enjoy the weekend: every squad is still perfect, every differential still looks inspired, and the whole season is out there waiting to be written. Bring on 2026/27.