WSL Fantasy 2026/27 Explained

New to WSL Fantasy? Here's everything you need to know about the 2026/27 game.

There is no previous season to copy and no tried-and-tested template that guarantees success. We're all figuring this one out together.

If you've played FPL before, some of this will look very familiar. You have a £100m budget, 15 players, a captain and transfers. Easy enough.

But WSL Fantasy has its own quirks, and some of them are pretty important. WSL and WSL2 are combined into one player pool, involvement points reward more than just goals and assists, you can make changes between matchdays and there isn't even a vice-captain.

So, before we all start blaming the game for our terrible decisions, let's go through how it actually works.

Every manager gets £100m to build a squad of 15 players. Your squad must contain two goalkeepers, five defenders, five midfielders and three forwards.

The biggest difference from a traditional single-league Fantasy game is that WSL and WSL2 players are all available in the same game.

There is no requirement to pick a certain number from either league. You can build a squad entirely from WSL players, entirely from WSL2 players, or mix the two however you like.

Each matchweek, you choose 11 players to start and four players to sit on the bench.

Your formation isn't completely fixed, but there are minimum requirements for your starting XI.

Once you've met those requirements, the rest is up to you. You could play a more defensive formation, load up on midfielders or go with three forwards.

Only your starting XI scores points. Your four substitutes don't score unless they are brought on through the game's automatic substitution system.

This is probably the biggest thing to get your head around if you're coming from FPL.

But there is a rather important catch.

If you don't make any manual changes and one of your starters doesn't play at all, the game can automatically replace her with an eligible substitute from your bench after the matchweek has finished.

This makes the bench order genuinely important. It also means you shouldn't start making random changes just because you can.

Your captain scores double points. That includes her normal points, bonus points and any deductions.

That makes captaincy a little more important than it might initially appear. You want the player with the biggest potential score, but you also want to be reasonably confident she'll actually play.

WSL Fantasy isn't just about goals and assists. Players can earn points for their involvement throughout a match, which gives the game a slightly different feel.

Appearance points

Play 60 minutes or more and you receive 2 appearance points. Play between one and 59 minutes and you receive 1 point.

Clean sheets

Goalkeepers and defenders receive 4 points for a clean sheet when playing 60 minutes or more.

Midfielders receive 1 point, while forwards receive no clean-sheet points.

Goalkeeper saves

Goalkeepers receive 1 point for every three saves.

A goalkeeper also gets 5 points for saving a penalty.

That could make some of the less obvious Fantasy picks incredibly useful. A midfielder who is constantly involved in the game may have a much higher floor than her goals and assists alone would suggest.

And yes, there are deductions

Yellow cards cost one point, red cards cost three, own goals cost two and missed penalties cost two.

Goalkeepers and defenders also lose one point for every two goals conceded.

You get two free transfers every matchweek.

Don't use them? They roll over, meaning you can build up a bank of transfers over time. You can hold a maximum of five.

Need to make more changes than your free transfers allow? Each additional transfer costs 4 points, deducted from both your Leg total and your season total.

The season is split into six Legs. Your overall season score continues from GW1 all the way through to the end of the season, but each Leg also has its own separate table.

So if you've had a terrible opening five weeks, congratulations: you haven't ruined the entire season.

Unlimited transfer matchweeks

There are six points in the season where everything resets and you get unlimited transfers for that matchweek.

That makes the start of each Leg a natural opportunity to completely rethink your squad without worrying about transfer costs.

If you're coming across from FPL, this bit is worth paying attention to because not all the familiar chips exist here.

The Free Hit could become particularly useful during blank matchweeks, when a large part of the player pool doesn't have a fixture.

Player prices can rise and fall during the season based on performance and transfers. But unlike FPL, you don't benefit financially from buying a player before her price rises.

That means there's no reason to make a transfer purely because you're worried about team value. Pick players because you think they'll score points, not because you think you'll make money from them later.

Not every club will necessarily have a fixture in every matchweek. When that happens, the number of players available to you can drop pretty quickly.

This is where squad depth, WSL2 value picks and the Free Hit can become particularly useful.

Rather than using a Free Hit simply because you fancy a different team for one week, keep an eye on the fixture calendar and save those chips for situations where they can genuinely make a difference.

This is where things get interesting, because we genuinely don't know what the perfect strategy looks like yet. It's the first season, so we're going to have to learn the game as we play it.

We're all new to this.

Nobody has a ten-year history of WSL Fantasy data. Nobody has spent years refining the perfect captaincy model. Nobody knows exactly how much involvement points are going to change the player rankings.

That means there is plenty of room to experiment.

We can find the cheap players who consistently return points. We can work out whether WSL2 players really are the value minefield we're expecting. We can figure out how important those matchday changes become once we're actually playing the game.

And, inevitably, we can all discover a £7m midfielder who scores three points while the £4m player we benched gets 17.

That's part of the fun.