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Our FPL expert’s perfect team for the start of the new season – including Man Utd, Spurs & Sunderland stars Our resident Fantasy Premier League expert offers up his team for the start of the 2026/27 season - and explains his decisions. In a week’s time, the 2026/27 Premier League season will finally get underway – and with it, of course, a brand new Fantasy Premier League campaign. It’s time for millions of players around the globe to work their way through those final drafts ahead of next Friday’s Gameweek 1 deadline. Among those millions, of course, is our resident FPL expert, who’s spent much of the last few weeks poring over price lists and digging through the stats to figure out his starting side – and now he’s ready to share his team with the world, which features some familiar faces and, perhaps, one or two surprises… How to build the perfect FPL team for the 2026/27 season Before I share my current team – and I’ll explain why it isn’t set in stone just yet below – I wanted to dig into the thinking underpinning my selections for Gameweek 1, because in many ways the ideas behind the team are more important than the actual players I’ve chosen. You’re bound to disagree with at least one or two of my picks, after all. You may well be proven right, too. The players I’ve chosen all have high ceilings for scoring but also crucially high floors, and are all but assured of starting minutes in teams that I feel confident can provide them with opportunities to pick up points. I’m not looking to take many gambles early doors, either on players or on particular teams, but rather to put together a team which I’m confident can get off to a solid start at a minimum. My team is also fairly top heavy in terms of cost, and even if I do make tweaks both Erling Haaland and Bruno Fernandes will be in my Gameweek 1 squad. That’s because it’s easier to tier down from the most expensive players, should it prove that a different team structure is superior, than it is to tier up. Doing that forces the use of more transfers, more quickly. I’m essentially starting with a simple assumption: That I won’t get it absolutely right from the very start. Every player in my side justifies their place and has the stats to back up my pick, but the chances are there will be players I’ve missed and others who underperform. What I want is to give myself a good platform in terms of points and the flexibility to quickly pivot to a better build if one become apparent. Because I expect to pivot eventually, I’m planning my team about four or five weeks in advance but no further. Anyone selling you a plan that involves a specific series of transfers any further into the season is surely overconfident. There’s simply too much unknown information at this time. I’d rather give myself maximum flexibility and a solid base for progression than to commit myself to a strategy which could go off the rails right away. So I’ve planned my side in such a way that I always have 11 players whose fixtures I feel happy with – and who I feel confident will play in those fixtures barring injury - for the first few weeks, but I’ve not looked any further ahead. There’s no plan for an early bench boost or wildcard. Such strategies are far too likely to backfire, and I want to save my chips for a rainy day. In the FPL, it always rains sooner or later. To expand on my points, here are some examples of players that I haven’t picked: I don’t want Morgan Rogers because even though he could be good value at £7.5m, there’s no way to know whether Chelsea will use him well. I do like João Pedro, because he has a much more settled role. I don’t want Bukayo Saka because he could well be rotated in and out at the start of the season due to recent fitness issues. I don’t want Dominik Szoboszlai because even though his ceiling is relatively high, it’s not massive for a £7.0m player his floor is fairly low. I don’t love Iliman Ndiaye because he plays for a low-scoring team and only managed nine goal contributions last season, so his floor is also a little bit too low for me. I’m not touching Fulham players with a ten-foot pole, because their early-season fixtures are horrific. You get the gist – I want proven production and solid early fixtures, but I also players who have a high upper limit to their scoring. I’m aiming for low risk, high reward, with an eye on how I might rotate my team over the first month or so. Our FPL expert’s team for Gameweek 1 revealed With all that in mind, you can see my team above (with an alt text description containing the whole team for those who use a screen reader). Quite a few of my picks are self-explanatory, especially players like Haaland and Fernandes, but I’ll drill down into some of my specific decisions here, and quickly run through the picks I’m on the fence about. In goal, I’m starting cheap. As I explained in a recent article about the best goalkeepers in the FPL this season, the stats suggest that David Raya is the only goalkeeper above £4.5m likely to score enough points to justify the extra expense. The delta between the rest of the field is quite narrow, so I want to target the low end. Brighton’s fixtures are mixed early doors, which isn’t ideal, but I think Bart Verbruggen is the best set and forget at the lower price point. I’m not picking Antonín Kinský at £4.5m because I simply don’t know how good Spurs’ defence will be as yet. He might well be the better selection, but it’s unprovable, and Roberto De Zerbi will have had to do some damned good work to get Spurs up past Brighton’s 10 clean sheets from last season. I just don’t want to feel compelled to use a free transfer on my goalkeeper if I can avoid it, when there will surely be better things to do with it. I’ve picked Verbruggen’s back-up as a £4.0m ‘handcuff’ in case of an untimely injury. Contrarily, I have picked Pedro Porro at the back because his attacking returns give him a very high ceiling. It’s one of my riskier picks, and I’ll admit that the floor is low enough that he’s an exception to my broader philosophy, but De Zerbi used the Spaniard very aggressively at the end of last season and I like the upside enough to take that one gamble. In midfield, I think Antoine Semenyo has such a high floor and ceiling that leaving him out seems indefensible. Ethan Ampadu was a defensive contribution magnet last season, and I’m baffled by how low his pick rate is given his price and score last season. Enzo Le Fée seems to have rightly attracted more attention. Rayan is a player I picked out in one of my first passes after the price lists were released. If you take his form from last season and extrapolate it across a full year, it adds up to a 170-point campaign. That’s tremendous value at £6.5m, and his floor seems high enough to me that I feel unlikely to regret the pick too much even if I do end up bailing for a more in-form player down the line. Going back to Ampadu, he’s one of two players I could see myself swapping out before the big kick-off. He competes at the same price point with new Brentford signing Mamadou Sangaré, who racked up astonishing defcon numbers in France – I’m just looking for certainty that he’ll be a nailed-on starter from Gameweek 1. The Malian had a reduced pre-season while the transfer was negotiated, but his ceiling is at Elliot Anderson levels. If he gets close to a full 90 minutes in Brentford’s final warm-up match, I’ll make the switch. The other doubt, as it stands, is Luke Shaw, simply because Manchester United are trying to sign a new left-back. If they succeed, I’ll replace him despite United’s excellent early fixtures – Kristoffer Ajer, another Brentford player, is my primary target in that instance, as he’s a strong defcon candidate who should be nailed on for the first couple of months due to injuries. Brentford might end up signing another centre-back, of course, which would change the maths there. That’s a spot which will be decided by the transfer market. New signings could, of course, change my mind about one or two players, but I’m generally wary of new faces simply because we just don’t have evidence as to how good that might be. I need hard proof that a player is both a reliable contributor and has a clear path towards a really high score. I believe that every player in my team has those attributes save, perhaps, for Porro, who I’ll admit has a lower floor than I’d like. Maybe I’ll regret that one if the Spurs defence looks leaky. That one pick aside, however, the numbers back me up across the board. I’m not guessing – I’m using numbers from recent seasons to determine where the best moves might be. Most importantly, however, I’ve also built a team that I don’t think I’ll need to change much over the first few weeks, allowing me to save up free transfers to make the necessary adjustments down the line. Once we have more data and know who’s in form and who’s struggling, a better team will become clear – I want to be able to pounce on that team with ease, and without having left myself too much work to do over the opening part of the campaign. Good luck, everyone.