The 2026/27 fixtures drop on Friday: your FPL head start begins here
The wait is nearly over. At 10:00 BST on Friday 19 June, the Premier League will publish the 2026/27 fixture list, and with it the unofficial starting gun for next season's Fantasy Premier League planning. For the keenest managers, the summer scheming begins the moment those 380 matches land on premierleague.com.
It might feel early — the new campaign does not begin until Saturday 22 August — but the managers who climb fastest tend to be the ones who do their homework now, while everyone else is still on the beach.
Why Friday matters
A fixture list is more than a calendar. It is the first proper map of where the early points are hiding. The Premier League's Fixture Difficulty Ratings, ranked one to five, go live alongside the schedule, giving an at-a-glance sense of who opens kindly and who runs straight into a wall.
Identify the defences with a soft start and you have your early budget enablers; spot the premium attackers with three or four favourable Gameweeks and you have the spine of your initial 15. Knowing which assets to swerve until the going gets easier matters just as much.
The World Cup trap
There is a complication this summer managers cannot ignore. The FIFA World Cup 2026 third-place play-off and final fall over the weekend of 18-19 July — barely five weeks before the Premier League returns. Anyone whose country goes deep will report back late for pre-season, with genuine fitness doubts heading into Gameweek 1. Sometimes the smart early pick is the player who spent July resting rather than chasing a winners' medal.
New faces in the dugout
The fixtures are also the first chance to plot the new managerial landscape. Four of the clubs who kept their status have appointed new bosses, while Michael Carrick at Manchester United, Vitor Pereira at Nottingham Forest and Roberto De Zerbi at Tottenham all head into their first full seasons after mid-campaign arrivals. Fresh management can reshape a side's FPL appeal overnight.
How to use the next two days
Until Friday, the sensible move is preparation rather than panic. Note the players you trust, sketch a couple of squad structures, and keep half an eye on pre-season friendly news. Then, when the fixtures drop, you can move quickly while the rest of the field is still squinting at the World Cup bracket. The advantage, as ever in FPL, goes to those who start thinking about it first.