FPL 2026/27 Gameweek 1: Three Squads That Fit the £100m Budget
Published 27 July 2026
The Gameweek 1 deadline is Friday 21 August 2026, 18:30 BST. Prices for all 558 players are live, which means the hardest job of the FPL year is now open: turning £100.0m into fifteen players before you have seen a single competitive minute.
This piece gives you three complete squads. Not shortlists — three finished, legal fifteens you could enter as they stand. Each one takes a different view of the same problem, and each has been checked against every constraint the game imposes.
The rules you are actually solving for
It is worth being precise about the box you are working inside, because most bad squads are bad for structural reasons rather than because of one wrong pick.
- £100.0m budget for all fifteen players.
- 15 players in fixed slots: 2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders, 3 forwards. You cannot trade a forward slot for a sixth midfielder.
- Maximum 3 players from any one club.
- Your starting XI needs exactly 1 goalkeeper, at least 3 defenders, at least 2 midfielders and at least 1 forward. Everything else is yours to arrange.
- Four substitutes, ordered — one goalkeeper and three outfielders.
The budget constraint bites harder than people expect. Only five players in the game cost £9.0m or more: Saka and Palmer at £9.5m, Isak at £9.0m, Bruno Fernandes at £12.0m and Haaland at £15.5m. Meanwhile 190 players are priced at £4.5m or below, and 67 sit at the £4.0m floor. Every squad on this page is really an argument about how many of those cheap slots you are willing to accept in exchange for the players at the top.
The prices that shape everything
Haaland is £15.5m and owned by 74.7% of the game. Bruno Fernandes is £12.0m at 48.7%. Between them they account for 27.5% of your entire budget, and both are widely enough owned that leaving either out is an active bet rather than a neutral one.
The most expensive player in each position is also the most owned in that position — Raya (£6.0m, 29.8%) in goal, Gabriel (£8.0m, 25.3%) in defence, Fernandes in midfield, Haaland up front. That correlation is worth noticing before you start, because it means the crowd has already priced "most obvious" into every position. Your edge, if you want one, has to come from somewhere else.
The opening fixtures
Fixture difficulty over the first five gameweeks separates the league more than usual this year. Liverpool have the softest opening run in the division (average FDR 2.60: Newcastle away, Forest, Ipswich away, Fulham, Bournemouth away). Manchester United, Leeds, Spurs and Manchester City follow at 2.80.
At the other end, Bournemouth and Fulham both average 3.60. Bournemouth open at the Etihad; Fulham get Chelsea, then Liverpool and Manchester United inside the first five. Cheap defenders from those clubs may look like value on last season's returns and still be the wrong call for August. The full FDR table has the complete picture.
One more thing that will not show up in any stats screen: Coventry, Hull and Ipswich are the promoted sides, and between the three of them exactly two players have any Premier League points from last season. Their entire squads are priced £4.0m–£5.5m. That is where cheap goalkeepers and bench fodder come from, and it is also where you have the least information.
Squad 1 — The Template
This is what the crowd's squad looks like when you follow every majority opinion at once: Haaland and Fernandes, £27.5m on two players, and then a defence that has to be excellent because there is nothing left over.
It works, and the defence is genuinely strong — Gabriel, Van Dijk, Guéhi, Senesi and Tarkowski returned 209, 175, 179, 175 and 170 points respectively last season, and four of them started at least 35 games. Lining up 5-4-1 is not a compromise here; it is the point. You are asking five defenders and Haaland to carry the scoring, and you have the best available defenders to do it.
The cost is visible on the bench. Kusi-Asare and Mheuka are £4.5m forwards with 6 and 1 career Premier League points between them. They are there to be legal, not to play. If Haaland is rested or injured, this squad has no forward cover worth the name, and the only fix is a transfer you had earmarked for something better.
Take this squad if you would rather not lose ground than gain it — a defensible instinct in a mini-league you expect to be tight. Owning Haaland and Fernandes means the two biggest weekly swings in the game can never happen without you.
The risk it carries is not the starting XI — it is that four of your fifteen players are inert. One injury in defence and you are fielding a £4.5m midfielder.
Squad 2 — The Balanced Build
Here the £15.5m goes back into the pot. No Haaland. The forward line becomes Thiago (£8.0m, 181 points, 37 starts), João Pedro (£7.5m, 177 points) and Calvert-Lewin (£6.0m, 142 points), and the money left over buys a midfield of Saka, Gibbs-White, Szoboszlai, Wilson and Ndiaye.
The thing to notice is the bench. Every outfield substitute in this squad is a starter for their club: Guéhi, Senesi and Calvert-Lewin between them made 102 league starts last season. There is no fodder. When somebody is rotated or knocked, you field a replacement who might actually score rather than a £4.5m placeholder who guarantees a blank.
That robustness is what you are buying instead of Haaland, and it is a real asset over 38 gameweeks. Nobody wins a season on their bench, but plenty of managers lose one to a fortnight of autoswitching in £4.0m defenders.
Take this squad if you are playing a long season rather than a fast start, and you accept that Haaland having a big weekend will cost you ground against three-quarters of the game. Structurally this is the strongest of the three.
The risk it carries is Haaland himself. He was the highest-scoring player in the game last season by four points, and 74.7% of managers own him. Twelve-point hauls from a player you do not have are the fastest way to bleed rank, and you cannot hedge that — you can only decide it is worth it.
Squad 3 — The Differential
Every player here is owned by under 15% of the game. No Haaland, no Fernandes, no João Pedro, no Szoboszlai. The most-owned name in the whole squad is Gyökeres at 14.0%.
This is not a gimmick build. It carries 2,192 points of last season's returns against the template squad's 1,940, because the ownership constraint pushes you toward players the market has under-priced rather than toward bad ones. Anderson (£6.5m, 180 points, 37 starts, 12.2% owned) and Gibbs-White (£8.0m, 188 points) are top-20 midfield scorers at mid-price ownership. Truffert made 38 starts for 165 points at £5.5m and is owned by 4.7%.
It also deliberately leaves £1.5m in the bank. Prices are frozen until the season is under way, so this is not about beating a rise — it is about what happens after Gameweek 1. The opening weekend always changes somebody's price and somebody's reputation, and £1.5m of slack is the difference between making the upgrade you want with your free transfer and needing to take a hit to reach it. Fully invested at £0.0m, your only move is a like-for-like swap.
Take this squad if you have decided in advance that finishing near the average is not the point. Nobody is behind yet — everybody starts on zero — so this is not a recovery play. It is a stance: you are accepting a wider spread of outcomes from the first whistle rather than tracking the field and hoping to out-transfer it in October. Every week the template hauls, you lose ground; every week it does not, you gain more than the field does.
The risk it carries is the obvious one: variance in both directions, amplified. A differential squad with no Haaland is a leveraged bet on your own reads, and you should only take it if you are comfortable being wrong loudly.
What the numbers can and cannot tell you
Every price and points figure on this page comes from a live pull of the FPL API, and all three squads were machine-checked against the budget, the positional slots and the three-per-club limit. There are no illegal squads here and no invented prices.
But there are three things the data genuinely cannot tell you in July, and it is worth being honest about them:
- Last season's points are the only performance signal that exists right now, and for some players they were earned somewhere else entirely. Senesi appears in all three squads on the strength of 175 points and 37 starts — every one of them for a different club, since he only joined Spurs on 1 July. The same applies to Anderson (Manchester City, 2 July) and Wilson (Leeds, 8 July). A new club means a new role, a new defence and a new set of set-piece duties, and none of that is in the number. Treat a summer signing's total as evidence they are good, not as a forecast.
- Promoted-club players have no Premier League data at all. Coventry, Hull and Ipswich supply 83 players to the game and almost none of them have a track record you can price. They are cheap for a reason and unknowable in equal measure.
- Pre-season minutes are not published anywhere useful. The single most valuable piece of information — who actually starts on 21 August — arrives in the last 48 hours before the deadline, from team news.
So treat all three of these as drafts to argue with, not as finished answers. Pull them apart, keep the structure you like, and revisit the cheap slots once the friendlies and the first team news land.
Before you lock it in
- Wait as long as you sensibly can. Prices are locked until the season is under way, so there is nothing to gain by rushing — and the last week of friendlies and team news is worth more than anything on this page. There is no advantage whatsoever to confirming early.
- Decide your Haaland position first, then build. At £15.5m he is not a pick, he is a structure. Every other slot changes depending on the answer.
- Count your real bench. If three of your four substitutes cannot start for their club, you have a thirteen-man squad and a hole waiting to open.
- Check the three-per-club limit before you fall in love with a plan. It is the constraint that most often kills an otherwise good draft.
- Leave a little in the bank if you can. £0.5m–£1.5m of slack is what lets your first free transfer be an upgrade rather than a sideways move once the season starts.
If you want the reasoning behind the individual decisions, our guides to fixture difficulty, price changes and captaincy go deeper on each. And if you are new to the game, start with the FPL beginners' guide.
Prices, ownership and fixtures correct at the time of writing. Check the player list for the current numbers before the deadline.