FPL Best & Worst Fixtures 26/27: Fixture Swings by Club

Bournemouth's first six Fantasy Premier League fixtures of 2026/27 all rated FDR 3 or higher — the toughest opening run of any club in the game — while Manchester United and Manchester City got the kindest. Talent still wins you points, but fixtures decide when those points arrive, and the early schedule this season had clear winners and losers.

This guide records how the opening six gameweeks looked on paper and, more usefully now the season is under way, how to read the next fixture swing. For where every club stands right now, all the way to Gameweek 38, the live fixture difficulty grid is the page you want — it rolls forward automatically as the season moves, and the teams pages break each club's run down in detail.

Gameweek 1, one line at a time

Season 2026/27 kicked off later than usual — Friday 21 August — because the World Cup had finished only weeks earlier. Post-World Cup fatigue was the theme of the early rounds: City (roughly 5,027 minutes across their World Cup squad) and Arsenal (roughly 4,285) carried the heaviest loads, which made their most-used internationals rotation risks even in kind fixtures.

The table below is the opening round as we previewed it before the deadline, kept for the record — the reads are pre-match, not results.

Target these teams

Four clubs stood out across the whole of the opening six Gameweeks: Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and Sunderland. None of them faced a run of genuinely tough matches before Gameweek 7, which made their premium and mid-price assets the safest early holds — Bruno Fernandes at Man Utd chief among them, launched at £12.0m off the back of that soft run and pencilled in as the consensus vice-captain behind Haaland. That window has now closed, so don't assume the run carries on: check what each of these clubs faces next on the fixture grid before holding on fixtures alone.

Arsenal deserve a mention too: across their first eight fixtures they faced only one recognised top-six opponent, Aston Villa in Gameweek 2. With Saliba ruled out for several months after his World Cup injury at launch, Gabriel became close to essential — last season's top-scoring defender was the one certainty in a short-handed Arsenal back line. Check the injuries page for where Arsenal's defence stands today.

Liverpool's opener was softer than the away trip suggested. Newcastle away, Forest at home, Ipswich away, Fulham at home — the tough part of their early schedule (Manchester City) didn't land until Gameweek 6. That was a five-week window for Liverpool assets — Szoboszlai's nailed minutes and set pieces the cleanest route in — though a new manager bedding in, Salah gone and Isak working back to fitness were honest caveats on how quickly the points would arrive.

Everton were the slower-burn pick: they played back-to-back promoted opposition early in the season, exactly the kind of run that suits Tarkowski at the back and Ndiaye further forward. The lesson carries over to any club, any week: a clean-sheet and attacking-return swing is worth having on the radar a Gameweek or two before it lands, not after.

Fade these opening runs

Bournemouth were the clearest fade of the opening weeks: Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea all appeared inside their first six fixtures, and every one of those six rated FDR 3 or higher. It wasn't a squad to build around before Gameweek 7 — which makes now the moment to revisit them on the live grid rather than writing them off on August's evidence.

Hull faced Man Utd, Villa, Chelsea and Newcastle inside their first five matches as a newly-promoted side — a brutal introduction that argued against reaching for their attackers early, even at launch prices of £4.0m and below.

Coventry opened away at Arsenal and also met Manchester City inside their first few Gameweeks. That said, van Ewijk was never one to write off just because the fixtures were unkind — a nailed-on right-back with genuine set-piece and direct free-kick threat is a profile worth holding through a hard run rather than selling into it, ready for when the schedule eases. Confirm he is still starting on the lineups page before you act on that.

Leeds rounded out the list: a tough opening stretch with little in the way of an obvious soft landing spot in the first six Gameweeks.

How to plan around a fixture swing

None of this is fixed. Fixture runs are about relative strength, not certainty, and the schedule that looked brutal in August can turn friendly by October — Bournemouth's defenders, for instance, are exactly the kind of squad worth revisiting once their run of reds ends. The skill is spotting the swing before it lands: buying into a good run a Gameweek early, before the price rises and everyone else has the same idea, and moving on from a player just as their fixtures turn hard rather than after a bad week finally shows up in the score. For the mechanics of reading a run — and the traps, like mistaking one green fixture for a genuine swing — see our fixture difficulty explained guide. No blanks or doubles were flagged in the opening Gameweeks, but postponed and rearranged matches can create them later in the season, so re-check the grid and the rules page before you hold a Free Hit or Bench Boost back for a schedule quirk.

Plan it properly

Reading the fixtures is only half the job — the other half is turning that into an actual squad over your next six Gameweeks, without blowing your budget on players whose easy run ends just as you've bought them. Our planner lines up your squad against the live fixture grid and our expected points model Gameweek by Gameweek, so you can see exactly where a transfer pays off before you commit; the players table shows who is actually getting the minutes. Our Gameweek 1 captain picks show how we approached the armband at launch, and if you're weighing up the promoted sides' cut-price defenders against these fixture runs, our promoted teams guide breaks down which of them were worth an early punt and how to judge them now.