Fantasy Premier League: Reintroducing our writers ahead of the 2026-27 season

The wait is almost over — it’s time to fall in love with Fantasy Premier League all over again.

As far as cultivating a winning squad for the 2026-27 FPL season is concerned, we’re into time added on with Friday’s Gameweek One deadline (6.30pm UK time; 1.30pm ET) looming large.

Here at The Athletic, our experts Holly Shand and Abdul Rehman will be your trusted companions throughout the season with advice and analysis that should hopefully boost your chances of success in your mini-leagues as well as the overall FPL leaderboard — and don’t forget Ben Dinnery, who returns with his live Gameweek One Q&A at 2pm to 3pm UK time (9am to 10am ET).

So now is as good a time as ever to reintroduce our FPL writers, recap their pre-season columns and find out what makes them tick.

Recap with our experts’ pre-season columns here

Want to test your mettle against your fellow Athletic readers? Use the code jr1oq0 to join The Athletic FC mini-league in Fantasy Premier League. Good luck!

What’s your name and where do you come from?

Shand: I’m Holly Shand, maths geek and fantasy football content creator. I love playing FPL as it combines my two passions in life: maths and football. I’m a very data-driven manager and I love delving into expected goals metrics, and studying who has had the most shots on target and who has created the most big chances for their team-mates.

I’m a maths graduate and former maths teacher, so it should be no surprise that I play FPL from this data angle. I’m from Grimsby, Lincolnshire, and have recently collaborated with my hometown club Grimsby Town on Fantasy EFL content, too. I’m hoping to get across the Humber a few times this season to check out the Premier League talent visiting Hull City.

Rehman: My name is Abdul Rehman, although most people in the FPL community probably know me better as FPL Salah. I’m from Dundee, Scotland, and I’ve been playing Fantasy Premier League for around 20 years now.

What started as a bit of fun with friends has somehow turned into a fairly significant part of my life. I’m not entirely sure at what point obsessing over £4.5m defenders and arguing about captaincy became a career, but here we are!

Do you remember when you first got into FPL?

Shand: I first started playing FPL after the 2014 World Cup, and 12 seasons later, I’m still here and as enthusiastic as ever. I’m always a little frustrated that I didn’t discover FPL sooner, as I remember playing versions of Premier League fantasy games in the late 90s and early 00s through newspapers.

Getting my Dad to call a premium-rate phone number to enter my team at the start of the season is a core memory. It feels like a different world now, where we have smartphones in our pockets and an infinite supply of fantasy advice 24/7.

Rehman: Yes, I actually remember the moment quite vividly. I was walking down the high street with one of my friends when he told me to join his fantasy football league. A few of my mates were already playing, so I thought I’d give it a go.

Gameweek One had already passed, so I joined in Gameweek Two. Despite starting a week late, I somehow managed to win the league in my first season.
As you can imagine, the bragging rights were off the charts. I thought I was some kind of football genius.

That was what got me hooked. We kept the league going for years, although eventually it dwindled as some friends stopped playing. Then, two seasons ago, we decided to reunite the original league, so it feels like things have come full circle.

When did you first try your hand at FPL writing or content creation?

Shand: After starting to play FPL in 2014, I joined ‘the community’ on Twitter, as it was known then, around a year later and organically built up my profile sharing tips and advice. I first wrote a fantasy column in 2016 but even then, the fantasy market felt quite saturated and it took me a while to find my place.

In 2017, I started my own fantasy website, with its niche to amalgamate all the best content from the gameweek. I really enjoyed it at the time, but I quickly realised that I couldn’t compete with the big publications and that video content would be a much better way of engaging with my audience. I began collaborating with the Premier League on their socials and fantasy show in 2018, and started my YouTube channel a year later.

Rehman: I used to spend a lot of time on fantasy football forums back when the game was still quite niche. Over the years, the discussion slowly shifted towards social media.

I created an ‘FPL Twitter’ account and remained completely anonymous because, at the time, I definitely didn’t want anyone knowing I was an FPL nerd spending my spare time discussing fantasy football on the internet!

I had absolutely no intention of becoming a content creator or growing an audience, but as the FPL community started to grow, my account did too, helped by a few decent finishes. I now have four top-1000 and six top-5000 finishes in the game.

I started writing threads and sharing my thoughts, and things have gone a bit further than I ever expected. I now write for Fantasy Football Hub and The Athletic, have become a pundit on the official FPL Show, and I’ve also appeared on numerous FPL podcasts.

It’s funny because none of it was planned. I just wanted somewhere to talk about FPL without my real-life friends finding out how much time I was spending on it!

When you meet people, do you tell them that you’re an FPL expert?

Shand: In all honesty, I dread being asked what I do for a living and I also hate the label “expert”! My friends and family still don’t fully understand what being a content creator is and looks like in the world of FPL, and most of them don’t fit the demographic of your typical fantasy manager, which makes it even more difficult to explain!

I can’t really blame them. YouTube had only just been created when I was leaving school in 2006. It remains a bizarre concept to many non-football fans, having a pretend team of real-life players that score you points and ultimately ruin your mood on a weekend! I really enjoy making content and discussing the game that I love, but I much prefer the term pundit to expert.

Rehman: Absolutely not! I don’t really consider myself an expert anyway. I’m just someone who loves football and is probably a little too obsessed with FPL.

To be honest, I actually prefer not to talk about FPL when I’m meeting people because it can feel a bit like talking about work. The irony is that a lot of my friends and family message me every week asking for advice, which can get quite overwhelming at times.

I also think that anyone who has played FPL for long enough knows that the game has a brilliant way of keeping you humble. You can spend an entire week analysing every possible option, studying the stats and planning your transfers, only to watch your carefully selected captain blank while the player you sold scores a hat-trick.

What do your friends and family make of the amount of time you spend talking about the game?

Shand: I think they’ve just about got used to it but it did raise some eyebrows early doors. I do tend to get obsessed with things in life, and FPL is no exception!

However, now that it’s my full-time job, they can’t really argue with the dedication I show to it. There are some blurred lines at times as to what counts as work and pleasure when the TV is permanently tuned to Premier League football or my WhatsApp notifications are pinging as a particularly well-owned player hauls in the fantasy points.

The game is a great conversation-starter, though, and whenever anyone speaks to me about FPL, it’s never a dull conversation. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Rehman: It probably took my wife the longest to adjust. She doesn’t like football and still doesn’t really understand how FPL works, so trying to explain why I’m annoyed because someone called “Bruno” missed a penalty probably isn’t the easiest conversation in our house. If FPL was still only a hobby, I’m not entirely sure she would be quite as understanding!

(Darren Staples / AFP via Getty Images)

I’m sure my friends and family sometimes wonder how it’s possible to spend so much time talking about fantasy football. To someone who doesn’t play, it probably sounds completely ridiculous. You can spend an hour debating whether a £4.5m defender is worth owning or having a serious discussion about who might be on penalties for a team.

But that’s part of what makes FPL so enjoyable. There is always something to talk about.

What is the one thing about FPL that keeps you coming back to the game?

Shand: I don’t think there’s anything out there that can compare to the game of FPL. Obviously, it combines my love of statistics and football, but it’s also a huge challenge.

The game spans around 10 months of the year, and it really is a marathon. In a world where everything is now so instant, the pure drama of playing a fantasy game across the whole season is unique. I also love how the real world can impact it: the summer transfer window, major tournaments, the death of a monarch, pandemics and the weather! It really is all-encompassing and each season presents us with a whole new set of challenges — and the chance of ultimate bragging rights.

Rehman: For me, the main thing is the anticipation and excitement of every gameweek.

You’re not just invested in the club you support but suddenly, you’re watching almost every match with some kind of interest. A Monday-night game between two teams you wouldn’t normally pay much attention to can suddenly become the most important match of the week because you have a £5.0m midfielder in action.

The competitive side of it is a huge part of the appeal, too. Obviously, there’s the battle against friends and family, but I’m also always trying to get the best rank possible.

I’ve been fortunate enough to get into the top 50 managers in the FPL Hall of Fame, although my last few seasons haven’t been quite as kind and I’ve slipped down a little! That gives me another reason to keep coming back.

What are you most looking forward to about the 2026-27 FPL season?

Shand: The unpredictability. I really believe this whole campaign is going to be a challenge. It’s already getting off to a strange start, with lots of new managers in the Premier League and a whole host of the top names returning very late to pre-season following the World Cup. We’ve got that long international break at the end of Gameweek Five, which may spoil all the momentum before we get into the meat of the season and I do fear for the longevity of players given the sheer number of games that they may have to play.

Rehman: I’m really looking forward to seeing how this season shapes up because it feels like one of the most uncertain seasons we’ve had in a long time and that’s what makes the start of a new FPL season so exciting.

Everyone starts on a level playing field. There are new bargains to discover, players whose prices might be completely wrong and plenty of uncertainty about which teams and players are going to emerge as the best options.

What would be your No 1 piece of advice for people playing the game in the 2026-27 season?

Shand: It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Be patient. It’s very hard to get things perfect for Gameweek One and it certainly doesn’t matter if you don’t. If you turn up every week, make your transfers and optimise your squad and captaincy week in and week out, you’ll do better than the vast majority of managers.

Engagement is everything, so don’t panic if you have a bad start. Keep chipping away, and you’ll gradually climb up the rankings.

Rehman: Don’t overreact. It sounds simple but it’s probably one of the hardest things to do in FPL.

Try to have a plan but don’t become too attached to it either. The best FPL managers are usually the ones who can balance patience with being flexible enough to react when you actually need to.

And perhaps most importantly: don’t spend every week chasing the points you missed in the previous gameweek.

The player you sold will score. The player you were going to buy will haul. Your captain will occasionally blank against a newly promoted side.