FPL Draft Rules: Snake Draft, Waivers, Trades and Scoring

Picks 8 and 9 of an eight-manager draft belong to the same person. That oddity, a back-to-back turn at the end of the first round, is usually the first thing anyone learns about the Premier League's second official fantasy game, and it explains a good deal of what follows. FPL Draft is a separate game from the classic Fantasy Premier League, run by the Premier League under the same account and in the same app, and free to enter, and it rests on one rule the classic game does not have: within a league, each Premier League player can be owned by only one manager.

Everything else follows from that. There is no £100m budget and there are no prices, because nobody buys anyone. Managers take turns to pick until each has fifteen players: two goalkeepers, five defenders, five midfielders and three forwards. The turn order is a snake, running first to last in round one and last to first in round two. After the draft there are no transfers in the classic sense. Unowned players are claimed through waivers, processed 24 hours before each Gameweek deadline with priority given to the manager lowest in the table, then signed freely until the deadline itself, and owned players move only by trade. Points are scored exactly as they are in the classic game. No captain, though, and no chips.

What FPL Draft is: one owner per player and no budget

The classic game asks several million people the same question and lets them all give the same answer. If the best forward in England costs a seventh of the budget, anyone who wants him can find the money, and in a ten-person mini-league it is quite normal for eight of the ten to own him. He then scores for all eight, cancels himself out, and the league is decided by whoever picked the better fourth midfielder.

Draft removes that possibility at the root. A league has its own pool, made up of every player registered in the game, and a player leaves the pool the moment one manager takes him. He stays out until that manager drops him or trades him. Nobody else in the league can field him in the meantime, however much they would like to and however obvious a pick he is. Other leagues are unaffected, since each one drafts from its own complete pool, so the same footballer has one owner in each of thousands of leagues and no two of those owners are in competition.

Scarcity does the job that price does in the classic game. A manager cannot have all of the best players because the others in the room take them first, and the constraint is the draft position rather than a spreadsheet. This is why Draft needs no budget and why it has never had player price rises and falls: a value that moves overnight has no purpose in a game where nothing is for sale.

Two smaller consequences are worth knowing early. The classic limit of three players from any one club does not apply, so a manager who wants four defenders from the same back line may have them if the draft falls that way. And there is no meaningful national table to climb. A Draft squad is the product of one league's draft and cannot sensibly be ranked against a squad built from a different pool, so the only table that matters is the one with your friends in it.

The same Premier League account runs both games. Entering Draft does nothing to a classic team, and plenty of managers in England keep one of each.

FPL Draft against the classic game, point by point

Most of what a classic manager knows carries across. The points are the same, the Gameweeks are the same, and the squad is the same fifteen in the same four positions. What changes is nearly everything that sits between the squad and the points.

Feature	Classic FPL	FPL Draft
Ownership	Any number of managers can own a player	One owner per player in each league
Building the squad	Bought within a £100m budget	Picked in turn over fifteen rounds
Player prices	Every player has a price that moves	No prices at all
Club limit	Three players from one club	No limit
Captain	Captain's score doubled, vice-captain as cover	None
Chips	Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost, Triple Captain	None
Changing players	Free transfers, with points deducted for extras	Waivers, free agency and trades, at no points cost
Opponents	A national table plus mini-leagues	One small league only

Take the captain first, because its absence changes the texture of a week more than anything else. In the classic game a single decision doubles one player's return, and a large share of the difference between two managers in any Gameweek comes down to the armband. Our guide to the captain and vice-captain rules sets out how that works. Draft has nothing equivalent. Eleven players score once each, and a haul from a forward is worth the same to a Draft manager as it says on the scoresheet.

Chips go the same way. There is no Wildcard to rebuild a squad that has gone wrong and no Bench Boost to cash in a strong bench, which makes a Draft bench a different sort of asset. In the classic game the bench is mostly a place to hide cheap players. In Draft it is four players nobody else can use, and holding a rival's obvious replacement there is a legitimate tactic. Readers who want the classic side of this can find the Wildcard, Free Hit and the other chips explained separately.

Transfers are the largest structural difference. The classic allowance, with its banked moves and its four-point deductions, is described in our piece on free transfers and points hits. None of it exists in Draft. A Draft manager can make as many changes in a week as the pool allows and never loses a point for doing so. The cost is competition: any unowned player worth having is wanted by someone else, and a queue decides who gets him.

A judgement, for what it is worth. Draft is the better game for a group of people who actually know each other and the worse one for somebody who wants to measure themselves against the country. It rewards knowing the eighth-best defender at a mid-table club, which the classic game almost never does.

Setting up a Draft league: size, scoring mode and what is fixed beforehand

A league has to exist before anyone can pick a player, and several of its settings cannot be changed once the draft has run.

A private league holds between two and sixteen managers. One person creates it, becomes its administrator, and shares a code or a link with the others. A public league is the alternative for a manager with no group to join: the game places strangers together in a league of a set size. At the 2017 launch public leagues held up to eight managers; the Premier League's more recent guidance offers public leagues of four, six or eight. That is one of the details reviewed between seasons, so check the current options rather than rely on a number from an old article.

• 2Fewest managers in a private league
• 16Most managers in a private league
• 120Players drafted by eight managers
• 240Players drafted by sixteen managers

League limits from the Premier League's published Draft rules; the totals are simply managers multiplied by a fifteen-player squad.

Size matters more than any other choice. Twenty Premier League clubs each name eleven starters, so 220 players start a full round of fixtures. An eight-manager league owns 120 players and fields 88 of them, which leaves a deep pool of regular starters unowned and makes the waiver list worth reading every week. A sixteen-manager league owns 240. That is more than the number of players who start in a given round, so some squads are certain to carry men who do not play, and the draft's later rounds become a search for anyone with a shirt. The Premier League's own guidance calls up to eight the optimum size for a private league, and it is hard to disagree.

The administrator then fixes the following.

Setting	Choices	Why it matters
Scoring mode	Classic or head-to-head	Decides whether the table ranks total points or weekly results
Draft date and time	Any slot ahead of a Gameweek deadline	The league scores from the first Gameweek after its draft
Draft order	A random draw or, in a renewed league, last season's table in reverse	Decides who holds the first pick
Time per pick	A short clock, from half a minute up to two minutes	Sets the pace and the length of the draft
Trades	No trades, all trades, administrator approval or manager approval	Decides whether and how deals between managers go through

In classic scoring the league table is a running total of every manager's Gameweek points, exactly like a classic mini-league. In head-to-head scoring each manager is paired with one opponent per Gameweek and takes league points from the result. The difference between the two is covered in more depth in our guide to classic and head-to-head mini-leagues, and it applies here without alteration.

Membership locks when the draft begins. Nobody can be added to a league that has already drafted, for the plain reason that the players have been shared out among the people who were present. A group that gains a ninth member in September has to start a new league or wait a year.

How the FPL snake draft order reverses each round

The first-round order is the administrator's to decide. For years it was always a random draw, and that remains the usual choice; since 2025-26 a league renewed from the previous season can instead use last season's table in reverse, so the manager who finished bottom picks first. Whoever comes out first has the pick of every player in the Premier League, which would be an enormous advantage if the order then simply repeated. It does not. In the second round the order runs backwards, in the third it runs forwards again, and so on through fifteen rounds.

Here is the first four rounds of an eight-manager draft, by overall pick number.

Draft slot	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4
First	1	16	17	32
Second	2	15	18	31
Third	3	14	19	30
Fourth	4	13	20	29
Fifth	5	12	21	28
Sixth	6	11	22	27
Seventh	7	10	23	26
Eighth	8	9	24	25

Read across any row and add the first two numbers. The answer is always 17. Every manager's opening pair of picks has the same combined position, which is the whole idea: the manager who gets the best single player gets the worst second one, and the manager at the far end gets two decent ones together.

The turn at each end

The eighth slot picks eighth and ninth without a gap, then waits while fourteen other picks go by before picking 24th and 25th. The first slot has the mirror image of that pattern, one pick, a wait of fourteen, then two together at 16 and 17. Managers call these the turns, and they demand a particular kind of planning. Somebody on the turn cannot wait for a position to "come back round", because by the time it does, fourteen players have gone and a run on goalkeepers or forwards may have started and finished in between.

The middle slots have a steadier rhythm. The fourth slot picks at 4, 13, 20 and 29, with gaps of eight and then six picks between turns. Nothing is ever far away, but nothing arrives in pairs either. Whether the ends or the middle are preferable is argued over every August in every league in England, and the honest answer is that the snake makes the difference small enough for the argument to be fun.

Why fifteen rounds is not perfectly even

A snake is exactly fair across any two consecutive rounds. Fifteen is an odd number, so there is one round left over, and it is a forwards round: the first slot picks first in eight rounds and the eighth slot in seven. In an eight-manager league the last round covers picks 113 to 120. By then managers are choosing a second goalkeeper or a fifth defender, and the eight-place head start is worth very little. The imbalance is real and tiny.

One thing the order does carry forward is the first waiver queue. Before the opening Gameweek, waiver priority is the reverse of the draft order, so the manager who picked last in round one has the first claim on whatever was left behind.

Inside the draft room: the pick clock, the watchlist and auto-pick

A Draft league's draft is a live event. At the time the administrator has set, the room opens, every manager who is online sees the same board, and a clock starts on whoever holds the first pick.

The clock is the administrator's choice, made in advance. The options have run from thirty seconds to two minutes a pick, and the length of the evening follows from it by arithmetic. Eight managers and fifteen rounds is 120 picks; at ninety seconds each, if every manager used the full allowance, that is three hours. Nobody does use the full allowance in the late rounds, and a typical eight-manager draft is over well inside that. Sixteen managers on a two-minute clock is 240 picks and a theoretical eight hours, which is a good argument for a shorter clock in a big league.

1. 1On the clockThe manager whose turn it is sees the timer start. Everyone else can watch the board but cannot pick.
2. 2Manual pickThe manager chooses any unowned player in a position their squad still has room for, and the turn passes to the next manager.
3. 3Clock runs outIf no choice is made in time, the game picks on that manager's behalf.
4. 4Watchlist firstThe automatic pick is the highest player on the manager's ranked watchlist who is still available and still fits the squad.
5. 5Default rankingWith no watchlist, or none of it left, the game falls back on its own ranking of the players.
6. 6Next turnThe clock resets for the next manager in the snake order.

The sequence described in the Premier League's Draft rules. It repeats for every pick in all fifteen rounds.

The watchlist is a queue as well as a notebook

Before the draft, and during it, a manager can build a watchlist: a ranked list of targets. In the room it works as a shortlist to pick from quickly. Outside the room it is an instruction. A manager who cannot attend at all, or whose connection drops in round six, is not skipped. The game takes the top available name from that list each time their turn arrives, and only when the list is exhausted or empty does it reach for its own default ranking.

The practical point is that an absent manager with a carefully ordered watchlist of sixty names can end up with a perfectly respectable squad, and an absent manager with no list gets whatever the default ranking produces. That ranking is a general one. It knows nothing about a manager's view of a newly promoted club's left-back.

Automatic picks obey the squad quotas. The game will not hand anyone a third goalkeeper because goalkeepers happened to be next on the list, and a manual picker finds the same thing from the other side: once three forwards are in the squad, forwards can no longer be selected.

Treat every pick as final. The published rules describe no way of taking a selection back once the clock has moved on to the next manager, which is the best reason to draft on a proper screen rather than a phone on a train.

Fifteen rounds, four positions: squad shape and the starting eleven

Fifteen rounds produce a fifteen-player squad, and the shape of that squad is fixed. It is the same shape as in the classic game.

Goalkeepers2players

Defenders5players

Midfielders5players

Forwards3players

Fixed squad quotas from the FPL Draft rules. The four figures add up to the fifteen rounds of the draft.

Show the numbers

Players required in each position in a Draft squad

Item	Value
Goalkeepers	2players
Defenders	5players
Midfielders	5players
Forwards	3players

The order in which the positions are filled is up to the manager. Nothing stops somebody taking three forwards with their first three picks or leaving both goalkeepers until rounds fourteen and fifteen, and plenty do the latter. The quota only bites at the limit: a squad must finish with exactly two, five, five and three, so the choices narrow as the rounds go by.

Positions are the ones the game assigns, and they hold for the season. A wide player listed as a midfielder scores as a midfielder for the whole of it, whatever his manager at his club does with him.

Because the quotas are the same for everybody, positional scarcity is easy to calculate and worth calculating before the draft. An eight-manager league must own 24 forwards and 16 goalkeepers. A ten-manager league needs 20 goalkeepers, which is every first-choice keeper in the division and leaves nobody unowned to cover an injury. In a sixteen-manager league 32 goalkeepers are drafted when only twenty start on a weekend, so at least twelve of them are reserves from the moment they are picked. Forwards run short in a different way, since many clubs start only one.

Choosing the eleven

Each Gameweek a manager names eleven starters and orders a bench of four. The formation rule is the classic one: one goalkeeper, at least three defenders and at least one forward. Within that, any arrangement of the ten outfield players is allowed, from 3-4-3 through to 5-4-1.

The second goalkeeper can replace only the first. The three outfield substitutes sit in a priority order the manager sets, and that order matters when someone in the eleven fails to play. The team has to be confirmed by the Gameweek deadline, which the Premier League has set at ninety minutes before the first kick-off of the round since the 2020-21 season. Before that it was an hour.

Waivers: the claim system and its priority order

Once the draft is over, roughly one question remains for the next nine months: who gets the player nobody picked, now that he has started scoring. In the classic game the answer is anyone who wants him. In Draft the answer is one manager, and the waiver system decides which.

A waiver request has two halves, a player to bring in and a player to release, and the two must leave the squad at its quotas. A manager can lodge as many requests as they like and must rank them. Nothing happens when a request is made. All of them sit unseen until the waiver deadline, which falls 24 hours before the Gameweek deadline, and then the game works through the lot in a single run.

1. 1Requests openAfter a Gameweek deadline passes, managers can file ranked waiver requests and propose trades for the next Gameweek.
2. 2Approval trade cut-offIn leagues where trades need approval, offers must be accepted 24 hours before the waiver deadline so that objections can be raised.
3. 3Waiver deadlineTwenty-four hours before the Gameweek deadline the game processes any approved trades still pending, then every waiver request in priority order.
4. 4Free agencyFrom that moment any player still unowned and not locked can be signed at once by whoever asks first.
5. 5Gameweek deadlineNinety minutes before the first kick-off, squads and line-ups lock and the cycle begins again.

Order of events in one Gameweek as set out in the Premier League's Draft rules at the time of writing. The intervals are reviewed between seasons.

Who goes first

Priority follows the league table in reverse. The manager at the bottom has the first claim, the leader the last. It is a deliberate handicap, borrowed from American sport, and it does its job: the manager having the worst season gets first call on the breakout player of the month.

Before the first Gameweek there is no table, so the queue is the reverse of the draft order.

The run then proceeds like a small draft of its own. The game takes the manager at the head of the queue and grants their highest-ranked request that can still be met. A request fails if the player wanted has just gone to somebody higher in the queue, or if the player to be released has already been released by an earlier successful request. A manager whose request succeeds drops to the back of the queue, and the game moves to the next. It carries on until no remaining request can be granted.

That drop to the back lasts only for the run in progress. The queue is rebuilt from the league table the following week, which is a real difference from American games where waiver position is a rolling asset carried from one week to the next. In FPL Draft a manager cannot save up priority by declining to use it. The only way to stay at the head of the queue is to stay bottom of the league.

Why ranking requests is harder than it looks

Suppose the bottom manager wants two unowned midfielders and lists them first and second. The first request succeeds and the manager goes to the back. Seven others now get a turn before the second request is looked at, and the second midfielder is very likely gone. A manager in that position has one certain claim per week and should spend it on the player they want most, not the one they think is most contested.

The player released in a successful request does not become available straight away. He is locked, along with anyone newly added to the game, and can be claimed only at the next waiver deadline. No rival can pick up a dropped player in the same Gameweek, which stops two managers passing a player between them to dodge the queue.

Free agency between the waiver run and the Gameweek deadline

For most of the week the unowned pool is behind glass. Then, once waivers have been processed, it opens. Any player who was not drafted, has not been claimed and is not locked is a free agent, and a free agent can be signed immediately by the first manager to ask.

There is no queue here and no handicap. The league leader has the same right as the manager in last place, and the only advantage is being awake. A signing still needs a player to go the other way, because the squad must stay at fifteen with its quotas intact: a defender in means a defender out. The released player is locked until the next waiver run, exactly as he would be after a waiver.

The window lasts until the Gameweek deadline, so with a waiver run 24 hours ahead of that deadline, free agency is a day long. For a standard Saturday round it covers Friday into Saturday morning. That happens to be when Premier League managers hold their press conferences and when most late injury news reaches the public, and it is what the window is really for. A goalkeeper ruled out on Friday afternoon cannot be dealt with by waiver, since the run has already happened. His deputy, sitting unowned, can be signed in a few seconds by whoever sees the news first.

It follows that waivers and free agency suit different players. A waiver request is the tool for a player several managers will want, since it is the only route with a fair order to it. Free agency suits the player nobody else has noticed or the one who only became interesting after the run. Using a waiver on a third-choice defender whom no rival wants costs the manager their place at the head of the queue for nothing; he would still have been there an hour later.

Leagues differ a great deal in how lively this window is. A group of eight who all follow the team news will strip the useful free agents within minutes of the run. A league with three engaged managers and five who drafted in August and drifted away will have good players lying unowned for months.

Midweek rounds compress everything. When a Gameweek deadline falls on a Tuesday evening, the waiver run is on the Monday evening, barely a day after the previous round has finished, and a manager who checks the game only at weekends can miss the whole cycle. The schedule quirks that produce those rounds are covered in our guide to blank and double Gameweeks.

Trades between managers and the approval settings a league can choose

Waivers and free agency move players in from outside. A trade is the only way to obtain a player who already belongs to somebody else, and it is the part of Draft that feels least like the classic game and most like a dressing-room negotiation.

One manager proposes, naming the players offered and the players wanted. The other accepts or declines. An offer has to be balanced by position: the same number of goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards must travel in each direction, so that both squads still hold two, five, five and three afterwards. A midfielder and two forwards can be exchanged for a midfielder and two forwards. They cannot be exchanged for two midfielders and a forward, however fair the deal looks on quality, and they cannot be exchanged for nothing. Two-for-one deals are impossible for the same reason.

What happens after acceptance depends on the setting the administrator chose when the league was made.

Trade setting	What happens to an accepted trade
No trades	Trading is switched off and no offers can be made
All trades	The deal goes through as soon as it is accepted
Administrator approval	The league administrator can veto the deal before it is processed
Manager approval	The other managers can object, and the deal is blocked if half of them do

Offers can be made through the week up to the waiver deadline. In a league with either approval setting the cut-off is a day earlier, 24 hours before the waiver deadline, to leave time for objections. Silence counts as consent: a deal that has drawn no veto by the waiver deadline is treated as approved and is processed then, ahead of the waiver requests. An offer nobody has accepted by its deadline lapses.

A player can appear in several offers at once. When one of those is accepted, the others involving him are cancelled, since he can only go to one place.

Which setting to choose

Open trading is fine among people who trust each other and it keeps deals quick. Its weakness is the lopsided deal late in the season, when a manager with nothing left to play for hands a title contender their best player for a reserve. The approval settings exist for that. Administrator approval is simple but puts one person in an awkward spot, particularly when the administrator is also in the title race. Manager approval spreads the decision, at the cost of inviting vetoes from rivals whose only objection is that the deal helps somebody else.

The veto ought to be for collusion, not for bad judgement. A manager is entitled to make a poor trade. A league that blocks every deal its members dislike soon has no trading at all, and might as well have chosen the first row of the table.

Scoring and Gameweeks: the classic points table with no multiplier

Draft adds no scoring rules of its own. A goal, an assist, a clean sheet and a booking are worth in Draft exactly what they are worth in the classic game that week, and when the Premier League amends the classic table, as it did for 2025-26 by adding points for defensive contributions, Draft changes with it. The core of the table has been stable for years.

Action	Points
Playing up to 60 minutes	1
Playing 60 minutes or more	2
Goal by a defender	6
Goal by a midfielder	5
Goal by a forward	4
Assist	3
Clean sheet, goalkeeper or defender	4
Clean sheet, midfielder	1
Every three saves by a goalkeeper	1
Penalty save	5
Penalty miss	-2
Every two goals conceded, goalkeeper or defender	-1
Yellow card	-1
Red card	-3
Own goal	-2

Bonus points are awarded too, three, two and one to the best performers in each match, by the same method described in our guide to the bonus points system. For the complete table, including the newer defensive rows and the thresholds attached to them, see the full FPL points system by position.

The missing multiplier changes what a good week looks like. With no doubled captain, weekly totals in Draft run lower than classic totals and sit closer together, and the gap between a strong squad and a weak one is the sum of eleven modest differences. Luck has less room in that arithmetic. One hat-trick cannot be turned into a thirty-point swing by a lucky armband.

Automatic substitutions

If a starter plays no minutes in the Gameweek, the game replaces him after the final match with the first player on the bench who did play and whose inclusion leaves a legal formation. A goalkeeper is replaced only by the substitute goalkeeper. The mechanics, including the cases where the first substitute is skipped because he would break the formation rule, are the same as in the classic game and are set out in our explainer on how the bench order drives automatic substitutions.

Bench order arguably matters more in Draft. A classic manager with a weak bench can buy cover. A Draft manager's cover is whatever they drafted in rounds twelve to fifteen, and no better replacement may be available in the pool.

How a head-to-head week is settled

In a head-to-head league each manager has one opponent per Gameweek. The higher Gameweek score wins and takes three league points; a level score earns one each. The table ranks managers on league points, not on the fantasy points behind them. Fixtures are generated by the game so that managers meet each other in rotation.

Head-to-head and waiver priority interact in a way worth noticing. Priority follows the league table, and in head-to-head the table reflects results, so a manager who has scored heavily and lost narrowly every week can find themselves near the bottom with the best squad in the league and first call on every free agent.

Mock drafts and leagues that draft after the season starts

Nobody drafts well the first time. The clock is quicker than it looks, the player wanted at pick 20 goes at pick 18, and the plan made on paper rarely survives the third round. The game provides a rehearsal for exactly this reason.

A mock draft is a practice draft with nothing riding on it. A manager joins one from the Draft site and drafts a full squad against the clock in real snake order. The squad is thrown away afterwards. It scores no points and joins no league. What the manager keeps is experience of the room, and some sense of where particular players tend to be taken, which is the nearest thing Draft has to a market price.

Mock drafts are most useful for learning a specific slot. A manager who knows they have the eighth pick in an eight-manager league can practise the turn: which two players to pair at 8 and 9, and what is typically left at 24. They are less useful as a guide to how a particular group of friends will behave, because a mock room tends to follow the default ranking far more closely than friends with grudges do.

Starting late

A league does not have to draft before the opening weekend. One created in October drafts in October, from the full pool, and begins scoring with the first Gameweek whose deadline falls after its draft. Points scored by those players earlier in the season count for nothing in that league, since nobody owned them then.

A late draft plays differently from an August one. The room knows who has started well and who has lost his place, so there is less guesswork and fewer wasted early picks. A head-to-head league that starts late has fewer Gameweeks to fill, and the fixture list is drawn up across those that remain.

An existing league can also draft again. Until 2025-26 each league had one draft and lived with it; since then the administrator has been able to schedule up to three additional drafts during a season, each attached to a chosen Gameweek and fixed before the Gameweek ahead of it begins. A redraft leaves the league table as it stands, and its order can be set from that table in reverse, so the manager at the bottom picks first. The Premier League suggests the January transfer window as the natural moment. It is a new setting, and the kind that is adjusted from one summer to the next, so confirm the current allowance before a league plans around it.

Late starts have one firm limit. The draft has to finish before a Gameweek deadline for the league to score in that Gameweek, so an administrator who schedules the draft for a Saturday lunchtime, when the round's first match kicks off at 12.30, has cost the league a week.

Where Draft came from and how its rules are kept

The Premier League announced the game in July 2017, opened it later that month and ran it for the first time in the 2017-18 season, with the first drafts needing to be finished before a Friday-evening deadline on 11 August. The classic game was by then fifteen seasons old, having started in 2002-03, and had several million entrants. Draft was launched as a companion to it. The scoring, the squad shape and the Gameweek calendar were lifted across unchanged so that an existing manager had only the new parts to learn.

The new parts were not new to the world. The turn-based draft, the snake order, the waiver queue weighted towards the weakest team and the vocabulary of free agents all come from American fantasy sport, which grew out of the rotisserie baseball leagues of the early 1980s and reached its largest audience through fantasy American football. American professional leagues themselves weight the first choice of new talent towards their worst teams, and the fantasy games copied the principle. FPL Draft copied the fantasy games, adjusting for a sport with one fixture list and no play-offs.

There is a British thread as well, and it is older than the Premier League's own game. Organised fantasy football arrived in England in the early 1990s in a form built around a group of friends bidding against each other for exclusive ownership of players. The mass-entry newspaper competitions that followed dropped the exclusivity, because a game with hundreds of thousands of entrants cannot have one owner per player, and the budget format became what most people in the UK mean by fantasy football. Draft is closer to the original idea than the classic game is.

Several independent sites offer draft-style Premier League games with their own rules on squad size, scoring and waivers. Everything on this page describes the official game only.

What is reviewed each summer

The principles have not moved since 2017: one owner, fifteen rounds, a snake, a reverse-order waiver queue. The settings around them have. Public league sizes are different from what they were at launch. The Gameweek deadline moved from an hour before kick-off to ninety minutes. Redrafts, league renewal and a draft order taken from the previous table all arrived in 2025-26. The scoring table changes whenever the classic one does. The Premier League republishes the Draft rules before each season, and the figures given here for league sizes, pick clocks and the 24-hour intervals are the ones in force at the time of writing.

A league administrator should read the current rules page before sending out invitations. Managers looking for the classic game's side of any of this will find it in the rest of our Fantasy Premier League guides, collected with the other English sport explainers on the England hub and alongside wider coverage in the football section.