What you’ll be able to do

Right, so it’s the night before the deadline, your squad’s a mess, and you fancy a second opinion that isn’t the loudest person in your mini-league. That’s basically what this guide is for.

By the end of this you’ll be able to open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot and use it like a mate who’s read the rulebook properly: checking your squad against the actual Fantasy Premier League rules, working through captain picks with reasons for and against, and planning transfers a few Gameweeks ahead without accidentally torching four points on a hit you didn’t need. The assistant does the reasoning out loud. You still make the call. That bit doesn’t change.

It’s for the free game, played for fun. There’s a short section on fantasy NFL drafts too, if that’s your thing.

Before you start

Fantasy Premier League is free. The game’s own terms say no purchase or payment is needed to enter, and it’s one team per person.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you first try this: the AI doesn’t know what’s happened this season. Not really. Its training data stops before this season, and FPL moves every single week. Prices shift, injuries pop up, suspensions land. None of that is baked into the model.

So it can’t see this week’s prices. It can’t see today’s injury list. It might not even know Coventry City, Hull City and Ipswich Town are in the league this season, because that’s new information to it unless you tell it or it goes and searches for itself.

If it does search, and some of these tools can, get it to name the actual page it looked at. Then go and check that page yourself. This isn’t about distrust exactly, it’s just that the assistant is only as good as what it’s looking at, and you want to know what that is.

It helps to have this season’s rules in your own head too, so you can spot when the AI gets them wrong:

  • Squad: 15 players (2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders, 3 forwards), a starting budget of £100m, and no more than 3 players from any one Premier League club.
  • Starting 11: any formation with 1 goalkeeper, at least 3 defenders and at least 1 forward. Your captain’s score is doubled; if the captain plays no minutes, the vice-captain’s is doubled instead.
  • Transfers: 1 free transfer each Gameweek after your first deadline. Every extra transfer costs 4 points. Unused free transfers roll over, and you can store up to 5.
  • Prices: they change during the season with transfer demand. If a player rises after you buy him, you keep half the rise when you sell, rounded down to the nearest £0.1m.
  • Chips: Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost and Triple Captain, two of each this season, one set before the Gameweek 19 deadline and one after it. Only one chip per Gameweek, and Free Hit can’t be played in back-to-back Gameweeks.
  • Deadlines: 90 minutes before the first kick-off of the Gameweek. Anything you change after that only counts from the next Gameweek.

The other thing to get straight early: never give an assistant your FPL login. Not your email, not your password, nothing. FPL’s own terms say you mustn’t let anyone else access your account, and you mustn’t use automated systems to pull information out of the game. So the workaround is dead simple: you copy your team across by hand. It takes two minutes and it keeps your account exactly where it should be, under nobody’s control but yours.

Get set up

You don’t need anything fancy. Any of the mainstream assistants will do this job, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, whichever one you’ve already got open in a tab. There’s no special fantasy football AI you need to hunt down.

What you do need is your own data, ready to paste in. Before you open the chat window, go to fantasy.premierleague.com and grab:

  1. Your current squad, with the price next to each name.
  2. Your bank (how much money you’ve got spare).
  3. Your free transfers, whether that’s one or you’ve been rolling them and you’re sat on more.
  4. The next few Gameweeks’ fixtures. The official Fixtures page has a Fixture Difficulty Rating (FDR) view, and FPL says that rating is built from Opta data plus each team’s home and away form over their last six matches, reviewed weekly. Copy the FDR for the Gameweeks you’re planning.
  5. The injury news for anyone you’re worried about, straight from the game. Flagged players carry a news line that reads something like “Groin injury - 75% chance of playing”. The Premier League also keeps an injuries page at premierleague.com/en/latest-player-injuries.

One more thing while you’re there: check the Price Changes page. It’s new this season and it shows how close each player is to rising or falling in price. It’s a guide, not a promise, the game says so itself, but it’s useful context to bring into the conversation.

Once you’ve got all that copied somewhere, you’re ready.

Playing fantasy NFL in the US instead? ESPN, Yahoo and Sleeper all run free leagues and all offer mock drafts, which are the best place to try out whatever plan the assistant gives you. Sleeper describes three draft types: snake (the order reverses each round), linear (back to the start of the order each round) and auction (managers bid from a budget). Yahoo’s private leagues with people you know are free; it also sells an annual subscription, Yahoo Fantasy Plus, with extra tools that free accounts don’t get, and you don’t need it to play. Whichever platform you’re on, paste your league’s actual scoring settings and roster slots into the assistant. They vary between leagues, and a generic answer won’t fit yours.

Try it yourself

Here are four prompts. Different jobs, each one. Fill in the brackets with your actual numbers.

First one, the squad audit:

You are my Fantasy Premier League second opinion. Rules for this season: 15 players (2 GK, 5 DEF, 5 MID, 3 FWD), max 3 per club, £100m budget, captain doubled, each transfer beyond my free ones costs 4 points. My squad with prices, my bank and free transfers: [paste]. Check it against every rule first, then give me the three weakest spots and why. Use only the data I paste; say if something is missing.

Second, the captaincy question, because this is the one that actually swings your Gameweek:

Here are my starting 11 and the next Gameweek's fixtures and injury news, copied from the official FPL site: [paste]. Give me your top three captain options, one reason for each and one reason against, and which you would pick as vice-captain. Do not invent stats I have not given you.

Third, transfers over a few weeks, hit costs included:

Plan my transfers for the next [3] Gameweeks. I have [2] free transfers and £[1.5]m in the bank. Fixture difficulty from the official FDR page for the next [3] Gameweeks: [paste]. Current prices: [paste]. Show whether any extra transfer is worth the 4-point cost, and give me a plan that uses no hits as the alternative.

And for a fantasy NFL draft:

Help me prepare for my fantasy NFL draft on [ESPN / Yahoo / Sleeper]. League: [number] teams, [snake / auction] draft, my pick is [number]. Scoring settings: [paste]. Roster slots: [paste]. Current player rankings from the platform: [paste]. Give me a round-by-round plan with two back-up options at each pick, and explain how the scoring settings change it. Use only the players in the list I have pasted.

Run them separately rather than mashing them into one giant prompt. You’ll get cleaner answers that way.

Check the result

Right, this is the bit people skip and shouldn’t.

First test: does the squad it’s describing break any rules? Fifteen players, two keepers, five defenders, five midfielders, three forwards, within your bank, no more than three from any one club. Count it yourself. Takes thirty seconds.

Second: is every player it names actually in this season’s game, at the price the game shows? If it mentions someone who left the league last season, that’s your old-data red flag right there.

Third: do its fixture claims match what’s on the official Fixtures and FDR page? Open the page, compare. If it says a team’s got three home games in a row and the fixture list says otherwise, it’s guessing.

Fourth: injury claims. Same principle. Check the flag inside the game or the Premier League’s injuries page. If the assistant says someone’s a doubt and the official news says nothing of the sort, don’t act on it.

Fifth, and this one catches people out: the maths. Every transfer beyond your free ones costs four points. If it tells you three extra moves will cost eight points, something’s wrong, that’s twelve. Check the arithmetic like you’d check a bill.

And honestly, the last test is just this: can you say in one sentence why you’re doing what it suggests? If you can’t explain it simply to yourself, don’t do it yet.

If it doesn’t work

Sometimes it just gets things wrong, and that’s expected really.

If it names a player who’s left the league, or a club that isn’t in it this season, it’s working off stale training data. Fix: paste the current player list again, be specific, and don’t assume it’ll remember from three messages ago.

If it hands you a squad that breaks a rule, too many from one club, wrong split of positions, over budget, paste the rules block again and ask it to check each rule one at a time against your numbers. Sometimes it needs that nudge to actually do the counting rather than eyeballing it.

If it changes its mind every time you ask a slightly different way, that’s annoying but also useful information: it means the call is genuinely close. Ask it for reasons and the downside of each option, then you decide. Don’t keep asking hoping for a different answer.

If it sounds very sure of itself about who’s going to score this weekend, take that with a pinch of salt. Nobody knows. Not you, not your mini-league, not the AI. It’s an opinion dressed up as confidence, and it’s fine to use it as one input among several.

On the privacy side: paste your team, your bank, your fixtures and the public stats. Never your login, never the email tied to the account. Letting someone else into your account is against FPL’s own terms, and an assistant is someone else.

And a separate note, because it’s worth being clear about this: this guide is about the free games, played for a laugh with mates or a work league. It is not about paid daily fantasy or betting, and it doesn’t do betting tips. An assistant’s “prediction” is still just a guess. If gambling on any of this stops being fun, GamCare’s National Gambling Helpline is 0808 8020 133 and it’s there 24/7, and GambleAware has free support in Great Britain at gambleaware.org.

Questions people ask

Which AI assistant is best for picking my fantasy football team?

Any of the mainstream assistants will do this job: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, whichever one you've already got open in a tab. There's no special fantasy football AI you need to hunt down.

Can I give an AI my FPL login so it can see my team?

No. Never give an assistant your FPL login, not your email, not your password. FPL's terms say you mustn't let anyone else access your account, and an assistant is someone else, so copy your team across by hand instead.

Does ChatGPT know current FPL prices and injuries?

No. Its training data stops before this season, so it can't see this week's prices or today's injury list, and it may not even know which clubs are newly in the league. If it searches, get it to name the page it used and check that page yourself.

What should I paste into the AI before asking for transfer advice?

Grab your current squad with prices, your bank, your free transfers, the next few Gameweeks' fixtures with the official FDR, and injury news from the game. The Price Changes page is useful context too.

Count it yourself: 15 players, 2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders, 3 forwards, within your bank and no more than 3 from any one club. Then check its fixture and injury claims against the official pages, and check the maths, since every extra transfer costs 4 points.

Keep exploring

If you liked the idea of testing an assistant properly before trusting it, “How to get AI to be honest with me” goes into that in more depth. There’s also “How to get AI to fact-check something”, which is basically the checking habit from this guide applied more broadly. And if you want to track your squad over the season, “How to get AI to make a spreadsheet” walks through building something to log your transfers and points week on week.

Sources and review notes

https://fantasy.premierleague.com/help/rules https://fantasy.premierleague.com/help/faqs https://fantasy.premierleague.com/help/terms https://fantasy.premierleague.com/fixtures https://www.premierleague.com/en/news/4680462 https://www.premierleague.com/en/latest-player-injuries https://fantasy.espn.com/football/welcome https://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/ https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN24152.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/overview-yahoo-fantasy-sln35629.html https://sleeper.com/fantasy-football https://www.gamcare.org.uk/ https://www.gambleaware.org/

Rules, chips, deadlines and prices checked against the 2026/27 Fantasy Premier League rules, FAQ and terms pages. FPL changes some rules between seasons, so check the rules page again from August each year.

Review date: 2026-09-26