FPL Double Gameweek Explained: Why Blanks and Doubles Happen

A Double Gameweek in the Premier League's fantasy game is any Gameweek in which at least one club plays two league matches before the next deadline. A Blank Gameweek is the reverse, a Gameweek in which at least one club has no match at all. Neither changes how points are scored. A player with two fixtures does not get double points; he gets two ordinary scores added together, and a player whose club is blank gets nothing because there is nothing to score from.

The idea was stretched to its limit on 13 May 2021, when Manchester United played Liverpool at Old Trafford. It was United's third league match in five days, after Aston Villa on the Sunday and Leicester City on the Tuesday, and all three fell inside one Gameweek. Managers who owned a United player had three fixtures to score from that week. Managers who owned a Liverpool player had two. Weeks like that come out of the way English football's league and cup calendars collide, which is why the subject cannot be understood without the FA Cup, the League Cup and the Premier League's power to move its own fixtures.

What a Double Gameweek and a Blank Gameweek are

Strip away the jargon and both terms describe an uneven fixture list. In a regular Gameweek all twenty Premier League clubs play once, which makes ten matches. A double exists the moment one club has a second match inside the same window, and a blank exists the moment one club has none.

Clubs usually go in pairs, since a match has two sides. A postponed fixture leaves two clubs without a game, and a rearranged one gives two clubs an extra. Pairs are not guaranteed, though. A club whose match is moved out of a Gameweek blanks alone if its opponent already has another fixture there, which is why both terms are best defined by reference to at least one club and not to a pair.

A single Gameweek can be both. If two clubs have had a match added and two others have had one taken away, the same week is a double for some players and a blank for others, with sixteen clubs carrying on as normal in between. The labels are used loosely for that reason. "Double Gameweek 34" does not mean every club plays twice in it. It means somebody does.

Size varies enormously. A double can involve two clubs or most of the division. A blank can cost a manager one player or leave only four matches standing.

• 38Gameweeks in a season
• 10Matches in a full Gameweek
• 380League matches in a season
• 90Minutes from deadline to first kick-off

Fixed features of a Premier League season and of the official fantasy game. The ninety-minute deadline is the figure in the game's published rules, which describe deadlines as subject to change.

What a Gameweek actually is

The whole subject rests on a distinction that the game never quite spells out. A Gameweek is not a round of the Premier League. It is a period of time.

The Premier League numbers its rounds as Matchweeks, one to thirty-eight, and when the fixture list is published in June each match belongs to one of them. The fantasy game has thirty-eight Gameweeks that begin by mirroring those rounds. But a Gameweek is defined by its deadlines. It opens at one deadline, set by the rules at ninety minutes before the first kick-off of that Gameweek, and it closes at the next. Any league match kicked off between those two moments counts in it.

So a match's Matchweek label does not travel with it. Suppose a fixture printed in June as part of Matchweek 29 is postponed and eventually played on a Wednesday night in the stretch of calendar that Gameweek 33 covers. For the league table it is still the clubs' Matchweek 29 game. For fantasy purposes it is a Gameweek 33 match, and the two clubs involved now have two fixtures in Gameweek 33 and none in Gameweek 29.

Nothing more is needed to produce a blank and a double. No special rule creates them. They fall out of fitting a fixed grid of thirty-eight windows over a fixture list that the season keeps rearranging.

The same logic explains a detail that puzzles people in the opposite direction. A match brought forward counts where it lands as well. In 2025-26 the League Cup final between Arsenal and Manchester City took two league fixtures out of Gameweek 31, and one of them, Wolverhampton Wanderers against Arsenal, was played early, in the middle of February. Its points belonged to the Gameweek it was played in, weeks before the blank it was moved to avoid.

DGW, BGW and TGW: the shorthand decoded

The game's own rules use none of these abbreviations. They grew up on forums and in the fantasy columns of British newspapers, and by now presenters use them on air as if they were printed on the fixture list.

Shorthand	Stands for	What it means
DGW	Double Gameweek	A Gameweek in which at least one club plays twice
BGW	Blank Gameweek	A Gameweek in which at least one club has no match
TGW	Triple Gameweek	A Gameweek in which a club plays three times; very rare
SGW	Single Gameweek	A normal fixture for a club, used when others in the same week have two
Doubler	Slang, not an abbreviation	A player or club with two fixtures in the Gameweek
Blanker	Slang, not an abbreviation	A player or club with no fixture in the Gameweek
BB, TC, FH, WC	Bench Boost, Triple Captain, Free Hit, Wildcard	The four chips, which are the reason these weeks get so much attention

A number after the letters is the Gameweek, so DGW33 is a double falling in Gameweek 33. A club name in front narrows it: "City's double" is the week Manchester City play twice.

Two usages cause real confusion. "Blank" is also the ordinary fantasy word for a player who scores two points in a match and nothing else, as in "he blanked again", and only context separates a player who blanked from a player whose club blanks. And "double" is sometimes heard by newcomers as a claim about scoring. It is a statement about fixtures and nothing else.

There is a further habit worth knowing. Writers talk about a double "for" a set of clubs and treat the rest of the division as single-Gameweek teams, so a preview may say a week is "a double for six teams". The other fourteen are playing as usual and their players score as usual.

Blanks come first: how a league match loses its weekend

A double is always the second half of a story. The first half is a league match being taken out of the date it was given in June, and in England there are three recurring reasons for that.

The League Cup final

The EFL's cup final is played at Wembley on a Sunday in late February or March, on a weekend that also carries a Premier League round. If the finalists are top-flight clubs, which they usually are, their league matches that weekend cannot be played. Each finalist's opponent loses its fixture too. Two finalists from the Premier League therefore mean two matches postponed and four clubs blank, the pattern seen in 2025-26 and in most seasons before it. How clubs reach that final is set out in the guide to the League Cup's seven rounds and byes.

The late rounds of the FA Cup

The FA Cup's later stages have historically landed on league weekends. A club still in the cup has its league match postponed, and so does the club it was due to play. The more Premier League sides survive, the more league matches go. This was the cause of the largest scheduled blanks: on the quarter-final weekend of 2023-24, only four top-flight fixtures were left.

Which rounds collide has changed, and a later section deals with that. The round structure itself is in the guide to all fourteen rounds of the FA Cup.

European and international club commitments

Now and then a club is required elsewhere. Liverpool's league match at West Ham United in December 2019 was postponed because Liverpool were in Qatar for the FIFA Club World Cup, and it was played at the end of January. Manchester City's home match against Brentford went the same way in December 2023, for the same tournament, and was fitted in the following February. A club's progress deep into a European competition can also force a league match off a midweek date it had been pencilled into.

In all three cases the clubs with no match are blank, their players score nothing, and the fixture exists only as an entry in the list of matches to be rearranged.

Cause of the blank	When it tends to fall	Who decides the clash exists
League Cup final	Late February or March	The semi-final results, which fix the finalists
FA Cup semi-finals	April	The quarter-final results
FA Cup quarter-finals, before 2024-25	March	The fifth-round results
Club World Cup or similar	Mid-season, in the years it applied	Qualification for the tournament
Weather, safety or other emergency	Any time	Events on or near the day

How the double is made, and who sets the new date

A postponed match has to be played. Three hundred and eighty fixtures make a season and the table is not complete without all of them. Somebody has to find it a date.

That somebody is the Premier League. Its rules give the Board the power to rearrange fixtures, and in practice the new date is worked out with the two clubs, the broadcasters who hold the rights and the police and safety authorities for the ground. The guide to how Premier League fixtures are made and rearranged covers that process in full. The fantasy game plays no part. It does not request doubles or avoid them. It receives the new date like everyone else and the match drops into whichever Gameweek's window contains it.

A new date has to be a free one for both clubs, and free dates are scarce. Weekends are taken by the league programme. Midweeks are taken by European ties for the clubs who have them, by cup replays in the eras that had them, and by other rearranged matches. What is left is usually a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday in a week when both clubs are otherwise idle, and that midweek nearly always sits between two league weekends. Whichever of those weekends shares a Gameweek with it becomes a double for the two clubs.

1. 1A club stays in the cupIt wins a tie and is due to play a cup match on a weekend that also holds a league round.
2. 2The league match is postponedIts fixture that weekend, and so its opponent's, is removed from the round.
3. 3A Blank GameweekBoth clubs have no match in that Gameweek and their players cannot score in it.
4. 4The Premier League sets a new dateA free midweek is found with the clubs, broadcasters and safety authorities.
5. 5A Double GameweekThe match falls inside a Gameweek where both clubs already have a fixture, giving them two.

The usual sequence when a domestic cup fixture displaces a league match. Postponements for weather or safety join the same sequence at the third step.

Not every rearranged match makes a double. If the only available slot falls in a week where one of the clubs has no other league match, the fixture simply fills what would have been a blank. And a match postponed at short notice can sometimes be replayed quickly enough to stay inside its original Gameweek, in which case fantasy managers notice nothing except a change of day.

The link between the two halves can be loose. Months can pass between the blank and its double, during which the postponed match is described in every fixture list as "date to be confirmed". Managers who talk about a club "having a double coming" are referring to that outstanding match.

Late call-offs and matches lost after the deadline

Cup clashes are visible weeks ahead. The other kind of postponement is not.

On the morning of Saturday 7 December 2024, with Storm Darragh crossing the Irish Sea and an amber wind warning in force on Merseyside, a safety advisory group met at Goodison Park and the Premier League called off that lunchtime's match between Everton and Liverpool. It was to have been the first fixture of the Gameweek. Two clubs went blank on a few hours' notice, the match was played the following February, and both had a double then.

Safety is the usual reason. A frozen or waterlogged pitch is rare at top-flight grounds with undersoil heating and modern drainage, and the decision is more often about the area around the stadium: wind, snow on approach roads, the state of public transport, the advice of the police. The winter of 2021-22 added a different cause, when clubs without enough available players during the pandemic applied to have matches postponed, sometimes on the day itself.

When the deadline has already gone

What happens to a fantasy team depends on timing. If a match is called off before the Gameweek deadline, a manager can react: move the affected players to the bench, change the captain, make a transfer. It is an unwelcome blank, but an ordinary one.

If the call-off comes after the deadline, the team is locked and nothing can be done. The Premier League's guidance to managers on this is consistent. Players in a match moved out of the Gameweek do not score points for it. Should the match be rescheduled within the same Gameweek, the points stay there; should it go to a different Gameweek, they are scored in that one. Affected starters are treated as not having played and are replaced from the bench in the order the manager set, as far as the formation allows, under the rule explained in the guide to auto subs and bench order. A captain caught in the postponed match hands his armband to the vice-captain.

A match that starts and is not finished

An abandonment is rarer still, and the 2023-24 season supplied the reference case. Bournemouth's home match against Luton Town in Gameweek 17 was abandoned in the second half after a medical emergency on the pitch, with the score level. The Premier League decided the fixture would be replayed in full. The fantasy game then voided every point scored in the abandoned match: players from both clubs were treated as not having appeared in that Gameweek, substitutes came in for them where they could, and vice-captains took over from captains. The replay was staged in March and counted in Gameweek 28, a double for the two clubs.

The rules do not set out a general procedure for abandonments, so that episode is precedent, not law. It is the best guide available to what the game would do again.

Scoring in a double: both matches count, and nothing is doubled

The most common misunderstanding about the whole subject is in the name. No points are doubled in a Double Gameweek.

A player with two fixtures plays two matches and is scored on each exactly as he would be if they were weeks apart. The two scores are then added. If he gets eight points on Saturday and two on Wednesday, he has ten for the Gameweek. Nothing about the second match is boosted by the existence of the first.

The scoring rules are applied match by match, and that has consequences worth setting out item by item. The full tariff behind each line is in the guide to how every position scores.

Scoring item	How it works with two fixtures
Appearance points	Awarded for each match: one for playing, two for sixty minutes or more
Goals and assists	Counted in each match and added
Clean sheet	Judged separately for each match; a player can keep two, one or none
Goals conceded	The deduction is worked out within each match, not on the combined total
Saves	Counted towards a point within each match, with no carry-over between them
Bonus points	Three, two and one are awarded in each match, so a player can earn bonus twice
Yellow and red cards	Deducted in the match where they are shown
Captaincy	The player's total for the Gameweek, both matches together, is doubled

Two of those lines matter more than they look. Because goals conceded are assessed inside each match, a defender whose side concedes once on Saturday and once on Wednesday loses nothing, where two in a single match would have cost him a point. And because bonus points are awarded match by match, a double offers two separate chances at the three, which is where many of the very large individual scores in the game's history have come from.

The captain

The one multiplication in the game is the captain's, and in a double it is applied to the whole Gameweek. A captain with two fixtures has both scores added and the sum doubled. That is the mathematical reason doubles draw so much attention. The captaincy rule and its vice-captain fallback are otherwise unchanged.

Whether a player has "played"

For substitution purposes the game asks one question about each starter, which is whether he played in the Gameweek. With two fixtures the question is asked once, across both. A minute in either match is enough, and a starter who is left out of the first and comes on late in the second is not replaced, even if a bench player outscored him several times over.

There is a risk built into two fixtures as well as an opportunity. A player sent off in the first match of a double will ordinarily be suspended for the second, since the ban applies to his club's next match. He has played in the Gameweek, so he is not substituted, and his week is the red-card score from one match and nothing from the other. The disciplinary mechanics are in the guide to Premier League cards and bans.

A blank for a starter, and how a team ends up short

For a player whose club has no match, the Gameweek's outcome is known in advance. He scores nothing. The game does not award a notional score, an average or compensation of any kind.

If that player is on a manager's bench, the blank costs nothing directly. If he is in the starting eleven, he is an absentee, and the bench is asked to cover for him in the usual way. One blanking starter and a playing first substitute who fits the formation is a non-event.

The trouble comes with numbers. A squad is limited to three players from any one club, but a large blank can involve ten or twelve clubs, and a squad built around the strongest sides is often built around exactly the clubs that are still in the cups. It is quite possible for seven or eight of a manager's fifteen players to have no fixture in the same week.

Take a manager with eight players from blanking clubs and seven with matches. Only seven can score, whatever he does. He must still name eleven starters, so at least four of them will be blanks, and the bench cannot help because the substitutes who might have covered are already in the team. He fields seven and takes four certain zeros.

Formation can make it worse. A team needs one goalkeeper, at least three defenders and at least one forward on the pitch. If the seven players with fixtures include only two defenders, a third must be named from among the blanking ones, and one of the playing midfielders or forwards may have to sit on the bench to keep the shape legal. Unless one of the starters who has no match can be legally replaced by him, his points are lost.

Nothing in the rules tops a team up. No free transfers are added for a blank, and extra transfers cost four points each as in any other week. The only tool that changes the arithmetic wholesale is a chip, which is the next section's subject.

What a double or a blank does to a chip

The four chips are explained in full in the guide to the Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost and Triple Captain. What follows is only the arithmetic of how an uneven Gameweek changes what three of them return. Every figure is invented for illustration, and none of it is a suggestion about when to play anything.

Bench Boost with two fixtures

Bench Boost adds the bench's points to the team's total for one Gameweek. Suppose the four bench players all belong to clubs that play twice, and score as follows.

• First match
• Second match

Reserve goalkeeper3points6points

Defender2points1points

Midfielder5points2points

Forward2points8points

Made-up scores for four bench players whose clubs each play twice. They illustrate the addition only and are not drawn from any real Gameweek.

Show the numbers

An invented bench in a Double Gameweek, match by match

Item	First match	Second match
Reserve goalkeeper	3points	6points
Defender	2points	1points
Midfielder	5points	2points
Forward	2points	8points

From their first matches alone the bench has twelve points, which is what a Bench Boost would have added in a week with one fixture each. The second matches add seventeen. The chip returns twenty-nine. The chip did not change; the bench simply had eight matches to score from in place of four.

Triple Captain with two fixtures

Triple Captain multiplies the captain's Gameweek score by three in place of two. Give an invented captain nine points in his first match and six in his second. His Gameweek score is fifteen. As an ordinary captain he returns thirty, and as a triple captain forty-five, so the chip is worth an extra fifteen.

Had he played only the first match, the same chip would have been worth an extra nine. The multiplier works on whatever the Gameweek total is, and two matches make a bigger total more often than not. Not always. A captain who scores nine in one match and is sent off in the other can finish below where a single fixture would have left him.

Free Hit in a blank

Free Hit lets a manager replace the whole squad for one Gameweek, within the usual budget and club limits, after which the original squad returns. Go back to the manager with eight blanking players and seven active ones. Without the chip he fields seven. With it he can pick fifteen players from clubs that do have a match, field eleven, and get his own squad back the following week with all its blanking players' fixtures restored.

The counts in that example are seven scorers against eleven. What those four additional players would actually score is unknowable in advance, which is the point at which arithmetic stops and judgement, which this page does not offer, begins.

Why blanks and doubles cluster in the second half of the season

The cause is the English cup calendar. The domestic cups thin out as winter ends, and the rounds that can pull a Premier League match off its weekend are the ones played from late February onwards: the League Cup final first, then the last stages of the FA Cup. Before then, cup ties are played in midweek or on weekends kept clear for them, and the league programme is undisturbed.

The doubles follow because the postponed matches need somewhere to go. Midweek dates in the autumn and winter are occupied by European group or league-phase matches and by the League Cup. They open up in April and May, as clubs are knocked out of Europe and the domestic cups are down to a handful of sides, and that is where the Premier League has traditionally found room. The result was a familiar rhythm for many years: blanks around March, a second blank in April, and the matching doubles packed into the closing weeks of the season.

What changed in 2024-25

That rhythm was altered by an agreement between the Football Association and the Premier League that took effect in 2024-25. Replays were removed from the first round proper onwards, as the guide to how FA Cup replays work and why they were cut back explains. All rounds moved to weekends. And the fourth round, the fifth round and the quarter-finals were each given a weekend with no Premier League fixtures on it, with the final placed on a Saturday kept clear of league matches.

For fantasy managers the quarter-finals were the important part. That round had produced the biggest scheduled blank of the year, the one that left four fixtures in 2023-24, and from 2024-25 it no longer displaces any league match. The Premier League's own fantasy coverage has since described the change as meaning fewer Blank Gameweeks than in earlier seasons.

Fewer does not mean none. The League Cup final still shares its weekend with a league round, and so do the FA Cup semi-finals. Both were still producing blanks in 2025-26. Weather and emergencies are untouched by any calendar agreement.

One judgement seems fair. The reform took away the most predictable large blank and left the game's unevenness resting more on events nobody can schedule, which makes these weeks harder to plan for, not easier.

How far ahead a blank or a double can be known

Less far than most previews imply.

A possible blank can be identified from the day the fixture list comes out, because the dates of the cup finals and semi-finals are fixed and the league round that shares each weekend is known. What is not known is which clubs will be affected. That depends on results.

The League Cup's finalists are settled by its semi-finals, played over two legs in the weeks after Christmas, so the clubs blanking on final weekend are confirmed only a few weeks beforehand. The FA Cup's semi-finalists are settled by the quarter-finals, a few weeks before the semi-finals themselves. Until each of those rounds is complete, every statement about who will blank is conditional on who wins.

The double is known later still. A postponed match has no Gameweek until the Premier League announces its new date, and those announcements come in stages across the spring, often alongside the television selections for the same period, and sometimes subject to change if a club's European tie goes one way or the other. A rearranged date can depend on a result that has not happened yet.

This is why the page in front of you explains a mechanism and contains no calendar. A list of this season's blanks and doubles would be out of date within weeks and wrong the moment a cup tie went against expectation. The Premier League's own fixture announcements are the only authoritative source, and the fantasy game's fixture page reflects each one as it is made.

Anyone running a private league should bear the uncertainty in mind when choosing a format. In a head-to-head league a manager can lose a match purely because his opponent had four doublers, an effect that averages out in a season-long total. The guide to classic leagues, head-to-head leagues and cups sets out how each table treats a single big week.

Unusual seasons: the biggest doubles and the triple

The number and size of these weeks has never been the same two years running. Specialist fantasy sites that have gone back through the archive report that no season of the game, which began in 2002-03, had passed without at least one double up to the end of 2025-26. Beyond that, the range is wide, and a handful of seasons show how wide.

Season	What happened	Effect in the fantasy game
2019-20	The league was suspended in March 2020 and resumed in June with two outstanding matches played first	Aston Villa, Sheffield United, Manchester City and Arsenal had two fixtures in the first Gameweek after the restart
2020-21	Manchester United's home match with Liverpool was postponed after protests at Old Trafford and replayed eleven days later	United played three times in Gameweek 35, a Triple Gameweek
2021-22	Clubs short of players during the pandemic had matches postponed through December and January	Six of the ten matches in one December round were lost, and the season had an exceptional number of doubles as they were replayed
2022-23	A full round of fixtures was postponed in September 2022 following the death of Queen Elizabeth II	Gameweek 7 went ahead with no matches and no points, and its ten fixtures were spread through the rest of the season
2023-24	Six league matches were displaced on FA Cup quarter-final weekend	Only four fixtures were played in that Gameweek, leaving twelve clubs blank

A full Gameweek10matches

December 2021 round4matches

FA Cup weekend 2023-244matches

Gameweek 7 of 2022-230matches

A full Gameweek has ten matches. The other figures are the December 2021 round hit by pandemic postponements, the FA Cup quarter-final weekend of 2023-24 and the round postponed in September 2022.

Show the numbers

Matches actually played in four depleted Gameweeks

Item	Value
A full Gameweek	10matches
December 2021 round	4matches
FA Cup weekend 2023-24	4matches
Gameweek 7 of 2022-23	0matches

The 2022-23 case is the strangest on the list. With every match off, the game did not cancel or renumber the Gameweek. It ran with a deadline and no fixtures. Every player scored nothing, managers who had paid for extra transfers still had the points deducted, and the season continued a week later. Two further matches were lost from the next round because of the policing demands of the state funeral, on top of one already postponed for other reasons, so those two rounds alone left thirteen fixtures to be rehoused.

The Triple Gameweek of 2020-21 is the outlier in the other direction, and it was less generous than it sounds. Three matches in five days meant heavy rotation, and no United player started all three. A manager with a triple captain on one of them was multiplying a total built from two starts at most. The archive suggests it was not quite unique, with Middlesbrough recorded as having played three times in one Gameweek in 2005-06, but it remains the only modern example.

What these seasons have in common is that none could have been planned for in August. A pandemic, a protest, a period of national mourning: each produced fixture lists that the fantasy game simply absorbed, Gameweek by Gameweek, using the same two rules it always uses. A match counts in the window in which it is played. A player scores for every match he plays in that window.

That is the entire mechanism. Everything else said about blanks and doubles, in every preview and on every forum, is an attempt to guess the fixture list before the Premier League has written it. For more on how the English game's competitions fit together, the England hub and the football section collect the other guides.