FPL Chips Explained: Wildcard, Free Hit and Their Limits

Press "Play Wildcard" in Fantasy Premier League, confirm it, and the decision is permanent. Press "Bench Boost" and it can be undone a minute later, or a day later, right up to the deadline. The two buttons sit a click apart in the Premier League's official fantasy game, and they obey different rules about almost everything: how long the effect lasts, whether it touches the squad or only the score, and whether a manager can back out.

A chip is a one-off boost that a manager chooses to play in a single Gameweek. In the 2026-27 season there are four kinds, the Wildcard, the Free Hit, the Bench Boost and the Triple Captain, and every manager holds two of each: one set for Gameweeks 1 to 19 and a second for Gameweeks 20 to 38. Only one chip may be played in any Gameweek, and a chip left unused when its half of the season ends is lost. That allocation is reset every summer. The count was different as recently as 2024-25, and the list of chips has changed more than once.

What an FPL chip is and how many a manager holds

Fantasy is ordinarily a game of scarcity. Fifteen players, a £100m starting budget, a limit of three from any one club, one free transfer a week with a few more that can be saved. Chips are the licensed exceptions. Each one suspends a single constraint for a single Gameweek and then expires.

• 4Kinds of chip
• 2Sets per season
• 8Chips held by each manager
• 1Chips playable in one Gameweek

The allocation published by the Premier League for the 2026-27 season. It is reset each summer and was different before 2025-26.

They divide neatly into two pairs. The Wildcard and the Free Hit act on the squad: they lift the cap on transfers so that a manager can rebuild all fifteen places at no cost in points. The Bench Boost and the Triple Captain act on the score: the squad is untouched and the arithmetic applied to it changes.

Chip	What it suspends	Lasts	Acts on
Wildcard	The cost of transfers	Permanently	The squad
Free Hit	The cost of transfers	One Gameweek, then reversed	The squad
Bench Boost	The rule that only eleven players score	One Gameweek	The score
Triple Captain	The captain's multiplier of two	One Gameweek	The score

Every manager gets the same chips. They cannot be earned, bought, traded or lost through poor performance, and a manager who joins the game in November receives the same set as one who entered in July, subject to the same expiry.

Chips cost nothing to play in the sense that no points are deducted for using one. The cost is the opportunity. A Triple Captain spent on a player who scores two points has added two points, and it is gone.

The word itself dates from 2015-16, when the game introduced a group of boosts under that name. The Wildcard is older and was only later described as a chip, which is why long-standing players still sometimes talk about "chips and Wildcards" as though they were different things. In the rules they are one category.

The Wildcard: unlimited permanent transfers and a cancelled hit

A manager who plays a Wildcard may make as many transfers as he likes before that Gameweek's deadline, and none of them costs points. He can change one player or all fifteen. When the deadline passes, the squad he has is his squad, exactly as if he had built it through ordinary transfers. Nothing reverts.

The official wording contains a phrase worth reading slowly: all transfers, including those already made in the Gameweek, are free of charge. That clause is what cancels a hit.

How a Wildcard wipes out a points hit

Suppose a manager with one free transfer makes three moves on a Tuesday. Two of them are additional transfers at four points each, so eight points are set against his next Gameweek score. On Thursday an injury to a fourth player persuades him the squad needs rebuilding, and he plays his Wildcard. The eight-point deduction disappears, because the three Tuesday transfers are now covered by the chip. He may then go on to reverse them, repeat them or do something else entirely.

The cancellation applies to the current Gameweek only. A deduction from a fortnight ago is already written into the season total and no chip touches it. How those deductions arise in the first place is set out in our guide to free transfers and points hits.

The budget still binds

"Unlimited" describes the number of transfers and nothing else. The rebuilt squad must still be affordable, and what a manager can afford is the money in the bank plus the selling price of every player he lets go. Selling prices are not the same as the prices shown in the transfer market. A player who has risen in value since he was bought returns only part of that rise when sold, a rule explained in the piece on price rises, falls and selling prices.

So a Wildcard is a rearrangement of existing wealth. A manager whose squad has appreciated has more to spend than one whose squad has stood still, and both have to fit fifteen players, two goalkeepers, five defenders, five midfielders and three forwards, under their own ceiling with no more than three from any club.

One side-effect follows. A player sold under a Wildcard and bought back after the sale has been confirmed returns at the current market figure, and that becomes his new purchase price. Any unrealised profit the manager held in him is lost. The same is true of any transfer, but a Wildcard invites more tinkering than an ordinary week and this is where the mistake tends to be made.

Saved transfers and the Wildcard week

Since 2024-25 a Wildcard has not wiped a manager's bank of saved free transfers. A manager who goes into the Wildcard week holding three comes out of it holding three. The chip week does not add one to the bank, though, as an ordinary quiet week would.

A Wildcard cannot be cancelled once played. Nor can it be played in Gameweek 1, where it would have no function in any case, since every change to a newly registered squad is already free until the first deadline passes.

The Free Hit: one Gameweek with a borrowed squad

The Free Hit gives the same freedom as the Wildcard, unlimited transfers at no cost, and then takes it back. For one Gameweek the manager fields whatever fifteen he can afford. At the following deadline the squad is returned to how it was before those moves were made.

1. 1Before the deadlineThe manager activates the Free Hit and confirms it. From that moment it cannot be withdrawn.
2. 2Building the squadAny number of transfers are made at no cost. Transfers made earlier that Gameweek are absorbed and their points deductions cancelled.
3. 3The GameweekThe temporary fifteen score as a normal squad would, with a captain, a bench and automatic substitutions.
4. 4The next deadlineThe squad reverts to the fifteen players held before the chip. Every Free Hit transfer is undone.
5. 5AfterwardsSaved free transfers stand at the number held before the chip week. Normal transfer rules resume.

The sequence under the 2026-27 rules. The Free Hit cannot be played in Gameweek 1 and cannot be cancelled after it is confirmed.

It is best thought of as a loan. The manager borrows a different team for a week and hands it back. Nothing bought under the chip is kept, and nothing sold under it is lost.

What happens to transfers made before and during

Transfers already made in that Gameweek, before the chip was activated, are swept into it. If a manager took an eight-point hit on Tuesday and plays the Free Hit on Friday, the hit is cancelled and the Tuesday transfers are reversed along with everything else when the squad reverts. The players he had at the previous deadline are the players he gets back.

That has a consequence people overlook. Any transfer a manager truly wants to keep has to wait until the Gameweek after the Free Hit. Bringing in a long-term signing on Monday and then playing the chip on Friday sends that signing back out again at the next deadline.

Prices in between

The transfer market does not stop for a week because one manager is on a Free Hit. Players continue to rise and fall.

The temporary squad is bought at current prices and vanishes at the next deadline, so a rise in the value of a Free Hit player during that week is never banked. The original fifteen come back as they were held, carrying the purchase prices recorded against them before the chip, and their selling prices then reflect whatever the market did while they were away. The manager's long-term team value carries on as though the Free Hit week had been spent standing still.

Two timing restrictions apply to the Free Hit. Like the Wildcard, it cannot be played in Gameweek 1. And, alone among the chips, it cannot be used in back-to-back Gameweeks across the halfway line, a rule dealt with under sets and expiry below.

FPL Wildcard vs Free Hit, side by side

The two transfer chips are confused more than any other pair in the game, largely because the screens look identical in use. The differences are all about what happens afterwards.

Question	Wildcard	Free Hit
How many transfers?	Unlimited	Unlimited
Points cost?	None	None
Cancels a hit already taken that Gameweek?	Yes	Yes
Squad after the next deadline	The new squad stays	The old squad returns
Transfers made earlier that week	Kept, and made free	Reversed with the rest
Purchase prices	Reset for every player bought	Original squad's prices preserved
Saved free transfers	Kept at the same number	Kept at the same number
Available in Gameweek 1?	No	No
Can it be cancelled?	No	No

Permanent against temporary is the summary, and it shapes what each chip is for. A Wildcard answers a structural problem: a squad built for August that no longer suits the fixtures or the injuries of November. The manager is choosing the players he wants for the next two months. A Free Hit answers a problem with one particular week, such as a round in which half his squad has no match, and assumes the existing team is one he will be glad to have back.

The treatment of saved transfers was equalised in 2024-25. Before that, playing either chip reset a manager's saved transfers, which made the timing of a Wildcard a matter of not wasting what had been banked. Under the current rules both chips leave the bank exactly as they found it. The week in which the chip is played simply does not count towards the accumulation.

One asymmetry is easy to miss. A Wildcard squad must be lived with, so its bench matters and so do its fixtures over the coming weeks. A Free Hit squad lasts a single round. A manager can spend the whole budget on the starting eleven and fill the bench with the cheapest players in the game, since nobody will ask them to do anything next week.

Bench Boost: fifteen scores in place of eleven

In a normal Gameweek four of a manager's fifteen players sit on the bench and score nothing for him unless a starter fails to play. The Bench Boost removes that distinction for one week. The points scored by the benched players are included in the total.

The first effect is simple addition. If the four on the bench score 2, 6, 1 and 9, the manager has eighteen points he would not otherwise have had.

The second effect is that bench order stops mattering. In an ordinary week the order of the three outfield substitutes is a ranking of who should come in first, and getting it wrong can cost points. Under Bench Boost all four are counted whatever order they stand in. The manager can leave them as they are.

The third effect follows from the second. Automatic substitutions have nothing left to do. The game normally replaces a starter who played no minutes with the first eligible player from the bench, a process described in the guide to bench order and formation rules. With every player already counting, there is nobody to bring on. A starter who does not play scores nought, a bench player who does not play scores nought, and nothing is swapped.

What Bench Boost leaves alone

The captain still has his score doubled. The vice-captain still inherits the armband if the captain does not appear. The squad is exactly the squad the manager already had, and any transfers he makes that week are subject to the usual rules and the usual four-point cost beyond his free allocation.

The chip also does nothing about the quality of the bench. Most managers run a cheap one: a second goalkeeper who never plays, a defender at the minimum price. A Bench Boost applied to that bench adds very little. To get much from the chip the bench has to consist of players who start for their clubs, which means money has to be moved out of the first eleven beforehand. The chip is one click, and the preparation for it can occupy several weeks of transfers.

A Bench Boost can be cancelled at any time before the deadline. It is activated on the Pick Team page, and until the deadline passes it is only a setting.

Triple Captain rules: the treble, the vice-captain and the negative score

Each week a manager names a captain, whose score is doubled, and a vice-captain as understudy. The Triple Captain chip changes one number. The captain's score is multiplied by three in place of two.

The gain is therefore exactly one more copy of the captain's score. A captain who scores thirteen contributes 26 in a normal week and 39 with the chip, a difference of thirteen. A captain who scores two contributes four normally and six with the chip. The multiplier covers his entire match score, including bonus points, which are awarded by a ranking described in our guide to how the BPS hands out bonus.

When the captain does not play

The ordinary succession rule applies. If the captain plays no minutes in the Gameweek, the armband passes to the vice-captain, and under this chip the treble goes with it. The vice-captain's score is tripled.

The test is zero minutes. A captain who comes off the bench for the final moments has played, and he keeps the treble for whatever those moments produced, most likely one point for appearing, three in total. The vice-captain, who may have scored a hat-trick, counts once.

If both the captain and the vice-captain fail to play, there is no captain that week. No score is multiplied. The chip has still been used.

Negative scores are trebled too

A multiplier does not distinguish between good scores and bad ones. A captain who is sent off after twenty minutes, with one point for appearing and minus three for the card, has a match score of minus two. Doubled, that is minus four. Tripled, minus six.

It is rare for a captain to finish below zero. It is common for one to finish on two, and the practical risk of the chip is ordinary disappointment far more than catastrophe.

Triple Captain can be cancelled before the deadline, and the captain himself can be changed while the chip is active, right up to the same moment. The full rules on the armband in normal weeks, including how the vice-captain takes over, are in the page on the captain's double points.

One chip per Gameweek, and which chips can be withdrawn

Only one chip can be played in a Gameweek. The rule has no exceptions and it applies across both sets, so a manager cannot use a first-set chip and a second-set chip together, which the calendar would prevent anyway.

It rules out every combination managers daydream about. No Wildcard to build the perfect fifteen and a Bench Boost to score all of them in the same week. No Free Hit with a Triple Captain on top. The usual way round it is to play the transfer chip one week and the scoring chip the next, which works with a Wildcard, whose squad persists, and cannot work with a Free Hit, whose squad has gone by then.

The second common rule concerns cancellation, and here the four divide along the same line as before.

Chip	Where it is played	Can it be cancelled before the deadline?	Why
Wildcard	Transfers page	No, once confirmed	Transfers made under it have already changed the squad
Free Hit	Transfers page	No, once confirmed	Same reason
Bench Boost	Pick Team page	Yes	It only changes how the score will be counted
Triple Captain	Pick Team page	Yes	It only changes how the score will be counted

The logic is consistent even if the rules do not spell it out. The two scoring chips do nothing until the deadline, so withdrawing one leaves no trace. The two transfer chips take effect the instant they are confirmed, because the manager immediately begins making free transfers under them. Allowing a cancellation would mean unpicking those transfers and recalculating hits, and the game declines to do it.

In practice this means a Bench Boost or Triple Captain can be set early in the week and reconsidered when Friday's press conferences bring news of an injury. A Wildcard or Free Hit should be treated as final the moment the confirmation box is accepted.

There is one interaction to note. If a manager has a Bench Boost active and then decides to play a Wildcard in the same week, the Bench Boost has to be cancelled first. The game will not hold two at once.

After the deadline, everything is fixed. A chip that was active is spent, a chip that was not active cannot be applied retrospectively, and no appeal to customer support will change either.

Sets, expiry and the Free Hit's timing restrictions

The arrangement of two full sets dates from 2025-26 and was kept for 2026-27. The season's 38 Gameweeks are divided at the midpoint.

1. 1Gameweeks 1 to 19The first set is available: one Wildcard, one Free Hit, one Bench Boost and one Triple Captain.
2. 2Gameweek 19 deadlineAny chip from the first set that has not been played is lost. It is not carried forward.
3. 3Gameweeks 20 to 38The second set becomes available, with the same four chips.
4. 4End of the seasonAny chip from the second set that has not been played is lost with the season.

The division used in 2025-26 and 2026-27. The halfway point is the Gameweek 19 deadline.

The first set must be played before the Gameweek 19 deadline passes. Whatever is left at that moment is deleted. A manager who has held back his first Triple Captain waiting for the ideal week, and reaches January still holding it, does not get to use two in the spring. He simply has one fewer than everyone who used theirs.

Why unused chips are lost

The expiry is the point of the design. Before 2025-26 the game gave managers a single Bench Boost, Triple Captain and Free Hit for the whole season, and the overwhelming habit was to hoard all three until the spring, when postponed fixtures are rearranged and some clubs play twice in a week. The first half of the season contained almost no chip decisions.

Splitting the allocation forces four decisions into each half. A manager can still save a chip for late in its window. He cannot save it past the window.

It also levels something. A manager who joins late, or who blunders with a chip in September, starts the second half holding exactly what the leaders hold.

The two Free Hit restrictions

The Free Hit cannot be played in Gameweek 1. With unlimited free changes available before the first deadline it would serve no purpose there, and the squad has no earlier state to return to. The Wildcard is shut out of Gameweek 1 on the same ground.

The second restriction is narrower. The rules state that the Free Hit cannot be used in both Gameweek 19 and Gameweek 20. Those are the last week of the first set and the first week of the second, the only point in the calendar at which a manager could otherwise hold two Free Hits either side of a single deadline. A manager who plays the first in Gameweek 19 cannot make the second active until Gameweek 21.

The reason is mechanical. A Free Hit ends by restoring the squad from the previous deadline. Played in consecutive weeks, the second would be restoring a squad that was itself temporary. Preventing back-to-back use keeps the sequence unambiguous.

The published rules attach no equivalent restriction to the other chips. Nothing in them stops a manager playing the first Wildcard in Gameweek 19 and the second in Gameweek 20, should anyone see a reason to.

What no chip can do

Chips suspend one rule each. Everything else stays in force, and a good deal of wishful thinking founders on that.

No chip adds money. The Wildcard and Free Hit remove the cost in points of transfers and leave the cost in pounds untouched. The budget is whatever the bank and the squad's selling prices add up to on the day.

No chip lifts the club limit. Three players from any one Premier League club is the maximum under a Wildcard, under a Free Hit, and in every other week. When a club has two fixtures in a round and a manager would like six of its players, the rule is the same as ever.

No chip changes the squad shape or the formation rules. Fifteen players in the fixed two, five, five, three split. A starting eleven with one goalkeeper, at least three defenders and at least one forward. There was once a chip that altered formations. It was withdrawn.

No chip can be moved after the deadline. A manager who meant to play the Triple Captain and forgot cannot add it on Saturday evening. One who played it and regrets the choice of captain cannot shift it to next week.

No chip can be taken back after a poor week. A Bench Boost that returned four points has been used as surely as one that returned forty. There is no refund for bad luck, a postponed match or a late withdrawal in the warm-up.

No chip affects how points are scored on the pitch. A goal by a midfielder is worth what the scoring table says in every week of the season. Chips change which of a manager's players count and how many times, never what those players earned, a subject covered in the guide to how every position scores.

The postponement case deserves a second look, because it is where the rules feel hardest. If a manager plays a Bench Boost and one of the matches involving his players is called off after the deadline, the chip is spent and the affected players score nothing for that Gameweek. The fixture, when rearranged, will fall in a different Gameweek. The chip does not follow it.

Chips in fixture-heavy weeks, as arithmetic

Most Gameweeks give each club one match. Occasionally a club has two in a single Gameweek, and occasionally none. Why that happens, and how the Premier League reschedules postponed fixtures, is the subject of our guide to blank and double Gameweeks. What follows is only the arithmetic of how each chip responds to the number of matches.

A manager's Gameweek total is a count of match scores. In a normal week with one fixture per club he has eleven starters, and the captain is counted twice, so twelve match scores go into the total.

Single week, no chip12match scores

Single week, Triple Captain13match scores

Single week, Bench Boost16match scores

Double week, no chip24match scores

Double week, Triple Captain26match scores

Double week, Bench Boost32match scores

Arithmetic only. Assumes every player in the squad plays every available match, with one fixture per club in a single week and two per club in a double.

Show the numbers

Match scores counted towards a Gameweek total

Item	Value
Single week, no chip	12match scores
Single week, Triple Captain	13match scores
Single week, Bench Boost	16match scores
Double week, no chip	24match scores
Double week, Triple Captain	26match scores
Double week, Bench Boost	32match scores

The two scoring chips scale with fixtures. A Triple Captain adds one further copy of the captain's Gameweek score, and if the captain plays twice that copy contains two matches. A Bench Boost adds four players, and if all four play twice it adds eight match scores where it would ordinarily add four.

The two transfer chips do not scale with anything. They change who is in the squad. A Wildcard or Free Hit played in a double week does not itself add a single match score. What it can do is alter how many of the fifteen have two fixtures, which changes the base the other arithmetic is applied to.

The same reasoning runs in reverse for a week in which several clubs have no match. A manager with seven of his starting eleven lacking a fixture, and no cover on the bench, is counting five match scores, captain included, before any chip. A Free Hit lets him field eleven who do play. A Bench Boost adds whichever of his four substitutes happen to have a match, which may be none.

Two cautions belong with the chart. The figures are counts of matches, and a count of matches is not a count of points. Two fixtures against the strongest sides in the division may be worth less than one at home to the weakest. And the assumption that every player plays every match is exactly the assumption that tends to fail when clubs have two games in five days and managers rotate. The arithmetic says where the ceiling is and nothing about how often it is reached.

Chips beyond the classic table: head-to-head, cups and Draft

A manager's chips belong to his team, and his team has one score per Gameweek. That score is used everywhere the team is entered.

In a classic league the Gameweek score is added to a running total. In a head-to-head league it is compared with one opponent's score for that week, and the higher wins the fixture. A chip played that week inflates the score in both. So a Bench Boost that adds eighteen points adds them to the overall rank, to every classic mini-league, and to that week's head-to-head match. The opponent has no defence beyond his own team.

The same is true of the cup competitions built into the game, in which managers are paired off each Gameweek and the lower score is eliminated. A chip counts in a cup tie exactly as it counts everywhere else. It cannot be played for the cup alone, or withheld from it. The different league formats and how cup draws are made are set out in the guide to classic leagues, head-to-head and cups.

When rivals find out

Before a deadline, a manager's team is private. Nobody else can see his transfers, his captain or whether a chip is active. Once the deadline passes, every team becomes visible for that Gameweek, and the chip played is displayed with it. A manager's history page lists which chip he played in which week for the whole season.

This matters in head-to-head leagues and cups, where a manager might like to know whether his opponent intends to Bench Boost. He cannot. Both sides commit blind and discover the other's decision at the same moment.

What rivals can do is look back. Anyone can see which chips an opponent has already spent, and therefore which he still holds. In the final weeks before a set expires, that is useful information about what is coming.

Why the Draft game has none

The Premier League runs a second fantasy format, Draft, in which the managers in a league take turns to pick players and each real player can belong to only one team. It has no chips of any kind. There is no captain to triple, squads are changed through waivers, free agents and trades with no open market to Wildcard into, and there is no budget. The scoring is shared with the main game; the apparatus built around it is not. That format has its own page on snake drafts, waivers and trades.

The chips that came and went

Nothing on this page should be assumed to hold for any season other than 2026-27, and the record of the past decade is the evidence.

Season	What changed
Before 2015-16	The Wildcard existed as a stand-alone feature. No other boosts.
2015-16	Chips introduced by name: All Out Attack, Bench Boost and Triple Captain, each usable once.
2017-18	All Out Attack withdrawn and replaced by the Free Hit.
2024-25	A fifth, the Assistant Manager chip, added and playable from Gameweek 24. Wildcard and Free Hit stop wiping saved transfers.
2025-26	Assistant Manager removed. Two full sets of the four remaining chips, one per half.
2026-27	The two-set arrangement retained unchanged.

All Out Attack let a manager field a 2-5-3 formation for one Gameweek, swapping a defender for an extra attacking player. It lasted two seasons. The Free Hit that replaced it has proved far more durable, probably because it solves a real problem, the week in which a squad has too few fixtures, where All Out Attack answered a question few managers were asking.

The Assistant Manager chip was the oddest experiment. It was announced for 2024-25 as a mystery chip, revealed in December 2024 and playable from Gameweek 24. A manager who played it added a real Premier League manager to his team for three consecutive Gameweeks, and that manager scored points for his club's wins and draws, its goals and its clean sheets. It was the only chip to stay active for more than one Gameweek and the only one to score on match outcomes. It was not retained.

For most of the years in between, the allocation was two Wildcards, one for each half of the season, plus a single Free Hit, Bench Boost and Triple Captain to be used at any point. That is the version many returning players remember, and it is the version described in a great many guides still in circulation. Under it a manager held five chips. He now holds eight.

The direction of travel has been towards more chips with tighter windows. Whether that improves the game is a matter of taste. It rewards attention across the whole season over a single well-timed week in April, which seems fair. It also means that eight of a manager's 38 Gameweeks, more than a fifth, are now played under some kind of special rule, and a boost used that often is less of an event than it was.

Names, counts and deadlines are confirmed by the Premier League when the game reopens each July, and the rules page inside the game is the only version that is certain to be current. For the wider sport those chips are played on, see our football coverage, and for more explainers on the English game, the England guides index.