How to Beat Your Colleagues at Fantasy Premier League (Even If You've Never Played)

I've been playing since 2008, and the honest truth is that beating your colleagues doesn't require watching every game or memorising stats. It requires understanding a few simple rules and avoiding the mistakes that most first-timers make. That's it.

The 2026/27 season kicks off on 21 August, with champions Arsenal hosting newly promoted Coventry City, and the FPL game itself launches in the coming days. Perfect timing to learn the ropes.

Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is a free online game where you pick a squad of 15 real Premier League players within a £100m budget. Your players earn you points based on what they do in real matches: goals, assists, clean sheets and more. Over 11 million people play each season, and most of them are in private mini-leagues with friends, family or colleagues.

The basics:

• You pick 15 players: 2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders and 3 forwards.
• You have £100m to spend, and each player has a price based on how good they are. A star striker might cost £14m; a squad player at a newly promoted club might cost £4m.
• Maximum 3 players per club, so you can't just buy the entire Arsenal team.
• Each gameweek you select a starting 11 from your 15. Only they score points, though if one of them doesn't play, a substitute comes in automatically.
• You pick a captain each week, and their points are doubled. This is the single biggest decision you make.
• You get one free transfer per week to swap a player in your squad for someone else. Extra transfers cost you 4 points each, and unused free transfers roll over.

That's genuinely most of it. There are also chips, one-off boosts like the Wildcard and Triple Captain, but you don't need to worry about them yet. The golden rule for a first season is simple: don't play a chip in the opening weeks. Save them for when you understand the game.

You don't need to memorise the full scoring matrix, but the headlines matter because they shape who you should buy:

• Playing 60+ minutes: 2 points
• Goals: 6 points for a defender, 5 for a midfielder, 4 for a forward
• Assists: 3 points
• Clean sheets: 4 points for defenders and goalkeepers, 1 for midfielders
• Defensive work: defenders and holding midfielders can earn 2 extra points for racking up tackles, blocks and clearances
• Bonus points: the best three players in each match earn 1 to 3 extra points

Two things follow from this. First, midfielders who score goals are gold, because they get more points per goal than forwards and often chip in with clean sheet and assist points too. Second, a player who starts every week is worth more than a better player who only plays half the time. Minutes are the foundation of everything.

The quickest way to understand what a good FPL player looks like is to see who actually delivered. These were the top scorers in each position in 2025/26:

Haaland topped the game with 27 goals and 8 assists. Bruno Fernandes finished just four points behind him despite costing £5m less at the start of the season, powered by a Premier League record 21 assists. Gabriel led the defenders on the back of 18 clean sheets plus goals from set pieces, and Raya's 19 clean sheets earned him a third consecutive Golden Glove. That Arsenal defence effectively won the league on its own - we've broken down how Arsenal won the title on the numbers separately if you want the full story.

The most useful lesson for a new player: only four players in the entire game broke 200 points last season (Haaland, Fernandes, Gabriel, and Antoine Semenyo on 202). The gap between the elite few and everyone else is enormous, which is exactly why the structure below spends big on two or three of them and saves money everywhere else.

The premiums win you points. The bargains win you mini-leagues, because they free up the budget that pays for the premiums. Every season a handful of players priced under £6m massively outscore their price tag, and 2025/26 produced some brilliant examples:

None of these were obvious in August. That's the point. Injuries, transfers and tactical changes turn unknowns into gold all season long, and the managers who spot them a few weeks before everyone else are the ones who climb the table. It's also the hardest part of the game to do by instinct - our guide to FPL differentials covers how to spot them, and it matters for the final section of this guide.

You'll read a hundred theories about squad structure. Ignore them. For a first season, one structure works and it's this:

In practice, that means building your £100m squad roughly like this:

• Goalkeepers (~£9.5m): one mid-priced keeper from a solid defensive team, one cheap backup you never plan to play.
• Defence (~£25m): three starters from teams that keep clean sheets, plus two of the cheapest defenders in the game who nail down a starting spot somewhere.
• Midfield (~£40m): this is where you spend. Two premium midfielders (the £9m+ players who score and assist every week), two solid mid-priced options, and one cheap fifth midfielder.
• Forwards (~£25m): one premium striker, one mid-priced striker, one budget option.

The logic is straightforward. Points in FPL are concentrated in a small number of elite attackers, so you want as many of them as your budget allows. Your bench barely scores points across a season, so every pound you spend on substitutes is a pound not earning you anything. Cheap bench, expensive starting 11.

One warning for the launch period: player prices for 2026/27 will be revealed when the game goes live, and everyone's first draft changes a dozen times before the deadline. Don't agonise. You can make unlimited free changes right up until the Gameweek 1 deadline, so pick a sensible squad now and refine it as pre-season plays out.

Most office mini-leagues aren't won by expertise. They're won by consistency. These five habits will put you above the majority of your colleagues by Christmas.

1. Never miss a deadline. The most common way to lose a mini-league is fielding injured players or missing a week entirely. Every gameweek has a deadline (usually 90 minutes before the first kick-off), and your team locks in at that point. Set a recurring reminder.
2. Captain the obvious player. Your captain scores double, which makes captaincy worth more than every transfer decision combined. Don't be clever. Pick your best attacker with the easiest home fixture, week after week. Fancy differential captains are how mid-table managers stay mid-table. Once you've got the basics down, our captaincy principles guide goes deeper.
3. Check team news before the deadline. Injuries and rotation are announced in press conferences a day or two before matches. Five minutes of checking on a Friday saves you from captaining someone who isn't even playing.
4. Use your free transfer on minutes, not memories. When a player in your squad stops starting matches, move them on. And pick replacements based on upcoming fixtures, because a mid-priced player facing three promoted sides will usually outscore a star facing Arsenal and Liverpool.
5. Don't chase last week's points. The classic beginner mistake is buying whoever just scored a hat-trick. By the time you've bought them, the easy fixtures that produced the hat-trick have often gone. Buy players before their good run of fixtures, not after.

Do these five things and nothing else, and you'll finish above most of your office. The people at the bottom of every mini-league aren't there because they lack football knowledge. They're there because they stopped doing the basics in October.

The habits above take maybe 20 minutes a week. The problem is that they take 20 minutes every week, for 38 weeks, including the fortnight you're on holiday and the month work gets busy. Mini-leagues are lost in those gaps.

That's exactly why we built The Assistant Manager. It's an AI manager for your FPL team: it tracks the data from every Premier League match, monitors injuries and fixtures, and recommends your transfers, captain and lineup each gameweek. You can review its suggestions in a couple of minutes, or let it manage the team for you entirely.

It's also built for exactly the problem the bargains section describes: spotting the next Guéhi or Casemiro from the data weeks before your colleagues notice them on Match of the Day.

For a first-time player, it solves the real problem, which is that your colleagues who've played for years have an instinct for this stuff that takes seasons to build. The Assistant Manager gives you that judgement from day one, without needing to watch a single game. My view is that a new player using it will beat most experienced managers doing it by feel, because the game rewards consistent, data-led decisions over gut calls.

It's free to get started, and setting it up before Gameweek 1 means your season starts on the front foot. Create your team and try it here.