What is FPL (Fantasy Premier League)?

FPL, the Fantasy Premier League, is the official fantasy football game of the English Premier League. FPL started in the 2002/2003 season and had 76K players in its inaugural season. FPL is 100 % free to play. FPL is a game that runs on gameweeks

FPL managers are awarded prizes for various achievements. FPL has become very popular on social media.

What is FPL (Fantasy Premier League)?

FPL, the Fantasy Premier League, is the official fantasy football game of the English Premier League. The game is free to play, and you can join at any time at fantasy.premierleague.com. The abbreviation FPL is typically used when talking or writing about the game, and we will also use it in this article.

The concept of FPL is similar to that of other fantasy football games. You, the manager, have a fixed budget for purchasing players from the Premier League clubs. FPL, the game, has set prices for each player.

The idea of a limited budget is to limit the number of premium (top) players that can be purchased. This forces you to pick cheaper players from smaller clubs, which makes the game more interesting.

Below is a screenshot of my FPL team in the 2024/2025 season. It includes three so-called premium players: Haaland, Saka, and Palmer. It is nearly impossible to include four because you run out of budget, so I have excluded players like Salah, Son, and Watkins.

You start with a £100 million budget, which must be used to purchase a starting eleven and four substitutes. No player is cheaper than £4.0 million. The most expensive player for the 2024/2025 season is Erling Haaland, at £15.0 million.

You get points for your FPL team when the players score goals, give assists, and keep clean sheets in actual matches. For example, if Erling Haaland scores a goal for Man City, you get 4 points from this goal if you have Haaland on your FPL team. There are also bonus points given to the best players in each game.

What makes FPL interesting (and challenging) is the fact you get only one free transfer for each Gameweek. This means you have to be able to think long-term and consider rotation between your substitutes and the starting XI.

Sometimes, you get unlucky, and your chosen player gets injured, suspended, or isn’t in the starting lineup. This adds another challenge to the game.

The winner of the game is the manager who has accumulated the most points during the season.

FPL history

FPL started in the 2002/2003 season and had 76K players in its inaugural season. The FPL game was created by ISM (International Sports Multimedia). The 2002/2003 season winner was Graeme Haddow from South Africa. FPL broke one million users in the 2006/2007 season and 10 million in the 2022/2023 season.

Mohammed Salah’s 303 FPL points in the 2017-2018 season are the highest FPL points by a player. Salah had 32 goals and 12 assists that season, including 26 FPL bonus points. Salah is often titled the FPL GOAT (Greatest Of All Times) and one of the most popular players every season.

The highest FPL points by a manager was 2844 by Jamie Pigott in the 2021-2022 season. The American FPL manager is the only one who has ever achieved over 2800 points for an FPL team.

More than 10.5 million people play FPL for the 2024/2025 season. Since there are so many players, it’s an outstanding achievement if you even make it to the top 100K. This means you’re in the top one percent of players.

In December 2024, FPL introduced the Assistant Manager chip to the game. This was the first time Premier League managers have been part of FPL.

Is FPL free to play?

FPL is 100 % free to play. There is no registration fee or monthly fee. You can join any time to practice and learn to play. However, if you want to compete, you must register your team before the start of the season. A new Premier League season typically starts on the second weekend of August.

You can play FPL via a laptop or desktop computer’s browser. If you prefer to play on a mobile device, you can install the mobile app. No official FPL app exists, but the Fantasy game is included in the official Premier League mobile app. Search for “Premier League” to find it.

Professional FPL managers often purchase subscriptions to tools such as Fantasy Football Hub or Fantasy Football Fix. Some communities, such as Fantasy Football Scout, also have helpful tools and features for premium members.

Don’t forget to check our popular free-to-use FPL Fixture Difficulty Tracker tool! We also publish FPL tips for every Gameweek, which you’ll find on our blog.

The gameplay

FPL is a game that runs on Gameweeks. Each Gameweek is played when the English Premier League matches take place. There are 38 Gameweeks in a season. The deadline for each Gameweek is 90 minutes before the opening match kicks off. After that, you cannot change your FPL squad for that particular Gameweek.

A typical Gameweek has matches on Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes, the opening match is on Friday, and the final game is on Monday. There are also a couple of midweek rounds each season where matches are played between Tuesday and Thursday. The time between Christmas and New Year is also unique because there are three Gameweeks played in a short period.

You, the FPL manager, get one free transfer for each Gameweek. You can make more transfers than one, but they’ll cost 4 points per transfer. This is why it’s crucial to think long-term and choose players you can bring from the bench when your initial starting XI player has a tough fixture.

During midweek, you follow team news and match results from domestic cups or European matches to gain helpful information on player performance. Sometimes, you want to wait for transfers and make them early because player prices fluctuate based on demand.

Once Gameweek has started, FPL managers follow matches and cheer for the points their starting XI players score. You cannot change your FPL team once the deadline has passed.

Do you want to compete against the Allfantasytips FPL team? Join the Allfantasytips.com league here.

After each Gameweek, it’s time to assess your team’s performance and consider changes. Maybe some players are performing poorer than you expected, or perhaps a cheap player is performing unexpectedly well you want to bring into your team. There might also be injuries and suspensions.

Read more about playing the game from our Beginner’s Guide: How to play FPL? We cover transfers, point systems, chips, and tactics in more detail.

FPL prizes

FPL managers are awarded prizes for various achievements.

• Top 20 managers of the season
• FPL Cup Winner & Runner-up
• Top 5 managers of the Second Chance League
• Manager of the Month & Runner-up
• Manager of the Week

The prizes vary from Premier League tickets to other merch. The first prize also includes a VIP hospitality package and tickets to Premier League matches. The official Fantasy Premier League website provides detailed information about the FPL prizes.

FPL on social media

FPL has become very popular on social media. Several YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of followers make dozens of quality videos about FPL daily. In addition, there are popular Telegram and Discord channels, X discussion, etc.

Every FPL manager should take advantage of this content. It is impossible to watch every game and follow every piece of news individually. To gain helpful information, we recommend watching tips and player analyses made by YouTubers.

These are the channels I recommend following:

• Let’s Talk FPL
• FPL Harry
• FPL Focal

The rise of social media has also created so-called template teams. This means a starting lineup consisting of players promoted by social media influencers, which is then copied by hundreds of thousands of followers.