Premier League 2026/27 fixtures

The slate at the top of this page is the live Gameweek 5 schedule with UK kick-off times and the official 1–5 fixture-difficulty rating for each side, home and away. The deadline is Fri 18 Sept, 18:30 UK — ninety minutes before the first kick-off of the round, which is why a Friday-night opener means a Friday-evening deadline.

Read the two difficulty numbers together, not in isolation. A 2 next to a club means the model rates that match-up as favourable for its attackers and defenders; a 4 or 5 is where premium assets get benched by their own managers and clean sheets stop being worth chasing.

The kick-off order matters for captaincy. An early-kicking captain who blanks leaves you the rest of the weekend to regret it; a Monday-night captain locks your rank until everyone else has scored. Neither is wrong — but decide it, do not drift into it.

The fixture-difficulty planner below runs from GW5 across the next stretch of the season, sorted so the kindest runs sit on top. Clubs averaging 2.5 or lower across a six-gameweek window are the target sides: concentrate your defenders and your budget midfielders there, and time your transfers to arrive as the easy run begins rather than half-way through it.

A single hard fixture inside a soft run is not a reason to sell. Three in a row is. The most expensive habit in FPL is the reactive transfer after one blank — the planner exists so that the move you make this week is the one you would have chosen a fortnight ago.

Double and blank gameweeks reshape everything above. They are announced as cup rounds and postponements settle; the /dgw page tracks every confirmed and likely case and the chip-timing consequences.

FDR is the 1–5 score the Premier League and FPL publish for each fixture, where 1 is the easiest match-up and 5 is the hardest. It considers venue and recent form, but it is deliberately coarse: it does not separate a side that concedes a lot from a side that scores a lot.

Onside's engine produces an enhanced rating that overlays the official FDR with our own xG, xGA and team-strength model, then feeds the projected points you see on the captain, transfer and lineup pages. The two usually agree on the obvious match-ups and diverge on mid-table sides whose home and away records are very different.

Use the official number for a quick read and the projected points for the decision. A player projected for 6+ points in a "4" fixture is still a start; a 3-point projection in a "2" fixture is still a bench.

Confirm the deadline in your own timezone: Fri 18 Sept, 18:30 UK. Press conferences land in the 48 hours before it and the predicted line-ups page updates through the week as team news firms up — check your XI against it before you lock, not after.

Price changes happen overnight UK time; a transfer you are certain about is cheaper made tonight than tomorrow if the player is rising. The price-change tracker shows who is close to moving.

Run your squad through Rate My Team before the deadline. It flags the bench order, the captaincy call and the one transfer the model would make with the fixtures above — the same projections that grade every prediction on this site in public.