When Does FPL 2026/27 Start?

**Fantasy Premier League 2026/27 is already open.** The game went live on 23 July 2026, one day after the official price reveal on 22 July, and squad picking has been running ever since — you can sign in and build your £100m squad right now.

**The GW1 deadline is Friday 21 August 2026 at 18:30 UK time** (17:30 UTC). That is 90 minutes before the season opener, Arsenal v Coventry, with the main opening matchday on Saturday 22 August. Everything after that is gameweek-to-gameweek: GW2 closes Friday 28 August at 18:30 UK, GW3 on Friday 4 September at 18:30 UK.

So the honest framing for anyone reading this in August: you are not waiting for the game to open, you are counting down to the deadline. The rest of this page is what to do with the time you have left.

Returning managers sign in at fantasy.premierleague.com with existing credentials; new managers register with email and password and start with a £100m budget and 15 squad slots (2 GK, 5 DEF, 5 MID, 3 FWD, maximum 3 players per club).

Prices are confirmed and will not move again until the season starts — Erling Haaland opens at £15.5m and Bruno Fernandes at £12.0m. Until the GW1 deadline your transfers are unlimited and free, so there is no cost to rebuilding your draft as many times as you like. That is the single most under-used fact in pre-season: nothing you do before Friday 21 August is permanent.

One thing that is genuinely not available yet: **FPL publishes no squad, rank or transfer data for any manager until the GW1 deadline passes.** No tool can show you your XI before then — ours included. Connecting your team early simply means the data is waiting for you the moment the deadline lands.

At 18:30 UK time on Friday 21 August your starting XI, captain, vice-captain and substitution order lock for the gameweek. There is no grace period and no late window; a submission thirty seconds past the deadline does not count, and whatever was saved at 18:30 is what plays.

The last two hours before a deadline are when the information arrives — press conferences, late fitness updates, and the lineup leaks that decide captaincy. So the useful discipline is not to submit early, it is to have your squad finalised early and leave only the captain and bench order open. Aim to have everything but those two decisions locked by 17:00 UK, then spend the last ninety minutes reading team news rather than rebuilding a midfield.

Onside runs a live countdown to this deadline on the FPL 2026/27 hub, driven by the official deadline timestamp rather than a hardcoded string.

Every manager gets two Wildcards. The first becomes available in GW2 — there is no use for it in GW1, because transfers are already unlimited and free until the opening deadline — and it must be played before the second-half window opens around the turn of the year. The second Wildcard activates in early January and runs to the GW34 deadline.

The Onside model rates **GW8–GW12** as the optimal first-Wildcard window. By GW8 the fixture-difficulty picture and the new managers' systems have resolved enough to plan five gameweeks ahead, and you still have two-thirds of a season to earn back the restructure. Playing it in GW1–GW4 spends the card before you have learned anything; holding it into December usually means you have already paid for the delay in points hits across the autumn.

The exact December cut-off for the first Wildcard is confirmed in-game each season; Onside surfaces the live date on the chip planner rather than guessing at it here.

**Free Hit** is a one-week Wildcard: swap the entire squad for a single gameweek, then revert automatically at the next deadline. It is at its most valuable in a Blank Gameweek, where a large slice of your squad has no fixture at all, and in a Double Gameweek where your own players happen to have one fixture and a different cohort has two.

**Bench Boost** counts your four bench players alongside the starting XI for one week. The optimal week is a Double Gameweek in which all 15 players have two fixtures — which usually means building towards it a gameweek or two in advance rather than firing it opportunistically.

Blanks and doubles are not announced in advance; they emerge from cup progression and postponements. Onside tracks the projected blank and double gameweeks as the fixture list moves and flags the highest expected-value week for each chip.

Counting back from Friday 21 August:

**Day −7** — finalise a draft squad in the Onside squad builder. Free transfers are unlimited until the deadline, so build three drafts and let the projections choose between them rather than committing to the first.

**Day −5** — read the GW1 captain shortlist and decide the captain rotation for GW1–GW5, not just GW1. The opening fixtures decide more of your first month than any single transfer will.

**Day −3** — audit set-piece exposure. Corners, free kicks and penalties are the cheapest source of bonus points in the game and the least reflected in price.

**Day −1** — scan the press-conference summaries for late fitness news.

**Deadline day** — squad locked by 17:00 UK; captain, vice-captain and bench order confirmed by 18:15; submitted before 18:30 UK.

The point of the cadence is that it moves every decision that needs thinking off deadline day, and leaves only the decisions that need information.