When does new FPL season start? Launch date, rules changes, price reveals and new positions explained

The Fantasy Premier League is back for the 2026/27 season – well, almost. With the World Cup out of the way, the FPL will start revealing player prices over the coming days with the launch of the game likely following soon after.

As always, 3 Added Minutes will be providing a ton of resources to help you build the best possible team as we build up to the start of the new Premier League season, but first we’re going to look ahead to explain when the FPL is likely to launch and what changes are coming to the game this season.

When does Fantasy Premier League 2026/27 launch?

It’s usual for the Fantasy Premier League to be up and running by now, but with the World Cup drawing so much attention the game’s launch appears to have been pushed back slightly – but we’re likely just days away from the start.

Although a date hasn’t been announced, as is custom, the FPL has announced that the first player price reveals will begin on Wednesday. That usually means that the game will launch within the next few days.

That would normally suggest that the game will be up and running by the weekend, but FPL has always launched either early or in the middle of the week in recent years – so either the game’s creators are breaking with precedent and giving us a weekend kick-off, or we’re getting a slightly longer run of price previews that normal, with the game launching at the start of the week commencing 27 July.

There probably won’t be a big announcement – the app will simply suddenly have the new year’s players and prices loaded, and you’ll be able to start building your first draft. In the meantime, we’ll get a steady trickle of price reveals to whet the appetite.

What’s new in FPL this year?

The fundamentals of the Fantasy Premier League are set to be unchanged for the 2026/27 season after a couple of years of experimentation – meaning that we will, once again, get a double helping of chips with one of each for each half of the season, but we won’t have an assistant manager and nor are we expecting any new adjustments to gameplay.

We’ll still be able to roll as many as five free transfers over from week to week, we still score points for defensive contributions, and as a whole the scoring system and strategy behind the game will remain unchanged – although there are some tweaks to the way that bonus points are awarded this year which will benefit goalkeepers, full-backs and forwards. Nothing revolutionary, though.

What we are getting is some great quality of life changes – including live updates to mini-leagues and overall ranks as the gameweek progresses, and gameweek recaps at the end of each week.

The single most important change, however, is that the FPL app will now tell us when players are likely to have their price change. For years, this has been a matter of guesswork or of using various apps and websites which didn’t always have a very strong hit rate with their predictions – but now we’ll get indications for the makers of the game itself. That should make buying and selling players far easier.

Two other changes are worth noting. Firstly, there won’t be a free set of free transfers at the turn of the year – that was only introduced last season to help player cope with the Africa Cup of Nations. Secondly, the final scores for players won’t be locked in until 09:00 British time on the morning after the last match of a gameweek, allowing for more time to ensure that bonus points are awarded accurately. So don’t gloat about your cup wins too early, just in case.

There are, as always, also a few players whose positions have been changed to reflect their tactical usage – although if anyone can explain to us why Bournemouth’s Eli Junior Kroupi is now down as a midfielder, we’re all ears. The 11 players whose positions have changed are as follows:

• Rio Cardines (Crystal Palace) - MID to DEF
• Eric Moreira (Nottingham Forest) - MID to DEF
• Ryan Sessegnon (Fulham) - MID to DEF
• Mats Wieffer (Brighton) - MID to DEF
• Lamare Bogarde (Aston Villa) - DEF to MID
• Patrick Dorgu (Manchester United) - DEF to MID
• Keane Lewis-Potter (Brentford) - DEF to MID
• Myles Lewis-Skelly (Arsenal) - DEF to MID
• Eli Junior Kroupi (Bournemouth) - FWD to MID
• Omar Marmoush (Manchester City) - MID to FWD
• Georginio Rutter (Brighton) - MID to FWD

Otherwise, the 2026/27 season of FPL will be the same old game we know and love, and we shouldn’t have to adjust our strategies too much – now, time for some price reveals and, soon enough, our first drafts…