GW1 best squad: our recommended 15 for the 2026/27 kick-off

Sixteen days out, and it's still jarring to open the game and stare at the player list. No Salah. Years of muscle memory — open the app, put Salah in, argue about the other fourteen — gone, because the safest pick in FPL history left on a free in June, and the pricing has gone strange without him. Haaland at £15.5m, Bruno Fernandes at £12.0m, and then nobody. Not one other player above £10.0m. The premium tier everyone usually spends all summer agonising over simply isn't there.

Add a World Cup final played on 19 July — half the big names got three weeks off and some are still easing back in — plus new managers at City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Spurs and United, and this is the least readable opening gameweek in years. We've spent the week running SmartPlay's projections against the predicted line-ups and penalty lists doing the rounds, and what follows is the squad we'd recommend. Deadline is 6:30pm UK time on Friday 21 August, which leaves plenty of time for the picture to change — and it might.

The squad

3-5-2 · £100.0m · Captain: Haaland · Vice: Semenyo

• GK: Kelleher (BRE, £5.0)
• DEF: Virgil (LIV, £6.5) · Pedro Porro (TOT, £5.5) · Dalot (MUN, £5.0)
• MID: Semenyo (MCI, £8.5) · Mbeumo (MUN, £8.0) · Szoboszlai (LIV, £7.0) · Gakpo (LIV, £7.0) · O.Dango (BRE, £6.5)
• FWD: Haaland (MCI, £15.5) · Calvert-Lewin (LEE, £6.0)
• Bench: Leno (FUL, £4.5) · Brobbey (SUN, £6.0) · Bassey (FUL, £4.5) · Kadıoğlu (BHA, £4.5)

Goalkeepers

Kelleher was quietly one of the buys of last season — 143 points behind a Brentford defence nobody rated in August. He's the confirmed number one, Spurs at home is the softest opener on the entire GW1 slate by our fixture numbers, and 5.6% of the game owns him. That'll do. Leno backs up at £4.5m — not a keeper we expect to need, but a real one, which matters more in week one than people think.

Defence

Cheap and boring, and no apology for either. Virgil is the only defender worth paying for in this draft, and even that is a squad-building call rather than a GW1 one: Liverpool open at Newcastle with a back line that's lost Konaté to Madrid and two more centre-halves to the treatment room. He's a hold for what comes after, not a bet on a clean sheet on the opening weekend.

Dalot at £5.0m is the pick we feel best about, for the least glamorous reason imaginable. Luke Shaw's calf will keep him out until after the September internationals — the club said so themselves — and he is still sitting in a quarter of all drafts. Every summer there's one of these. Take the free money. Pedro Porro rounds out the three; he's on set-piece delivery and Spurs under De Zerbi have looked lively in the friendlies. Bassey and Kadıoğlu fill the bench at £4.5m apiece — starters, both, which is all you can ask of a fourth and fifth defender in August.

Midfield

This is where the squashed price list actually helps. The £6.0m–£8.5m bracket is wall-to-wall with players who'd have cost ten-plus in the old economy, and it's where this draft was won and lost.

Semenyo is the pick that took the least convincing. Eleven goals in 27 since his January move to City, started Maresca's first friendly against Inter on Saturday, and looked every inch a first name on the teamsheet. He wears the vice armband at home to Bournemouth. Mbeumo leads United's line at Hull in every predicted XI we've seen, with Bruno behind him doing Bruno things. Szoboszlai is 47.5% owned already and deserves to be — the set-piece lists all have him on Liverpool's dead balls after Salah's exit, and most have him first in the penalty queue too.

Gakpo is the genuine opinion in this squad. Somebody has to take the shots Salah left behind, he's the most natural candidate on the pitch, and only 3.5% of the game is interested. Newcastle away will tell us quickly whether that's sharp or just a Tuesday-night talking point.

And then Dango, the pick your mini-league will laugh at until roughly 4pm on the 21st. Seven goals and six assists last season — all six assists to Igor Thiago, which tells you exactly how Brentford function — plus five penalties won, and he starts in every predicted XI. Spurs at home, 1.3% owned. If he blanks, we'll pretend this paragraph never happened.

Forwards and the armband

There's no captaincy section this week because there's no captaincy debate. Haaland is on penalties, at home to Bournemouth, has finished top FPL scorer after six gameweeks in every one of his City seasons, and is owned by three-quarters of the game. At that ownership the armband isn't about winning your league; it's about not losing it in week one. He captains, and we all move on.

Calvert-Lewin brings penalties at £6.0m — 14 league goals for Leeds last season and he kept spot-kick duty through the summer. Forest away is honest work rather than a gift, but pens at that price is the sort of pricing mistake you quietly say thank you for. Brobbey starts on the bench with Ipswich at home, first man on if anything smells wrong elsewhere.

Nearly men

João Pedro nearly made it, and the 54.6% of the game who own him may well be right. The hesitation is all context: away at Fulham, a brand-new manager whose Chelsea nobody has seen yet, and our numbers shading Semenyo and Mbeumo ahead at similar money. If he hauls, we'll take it on the chin with everyone else who faded him.

Bruno was harder. Second-best player in the game by our projections, takes everything United win, opens with Hull and Ipswich. In the end, £12.0m buys Mbeumo and most of a starting defender, and we couldn't make the maths say otherwise. Ask us again after two gameweeks. Gabriel at home to newly promoted Coventry is the clean sheet of the week and still didn't fit — something had to give, and it was the £8.0m defender.

The expected picks we passed on

The nearly men were close calls. These weren't — they're popular picks we're deliberately avoiding for GW1, and you deserve the reasons.

The World Cup bill comes due first at Arsenal. Saka didn't feature in the early friendlies and isn't due back until around 10 August — that's planned recovery, not injury, but it's also not a player you want on opening weekend with ten days of training behind him. Rice played ninety minutes in the bronze-final on 18 July and has been managed around a hamstring issue since Christmas; the predicted XIs we track leave both out. Eze may not be back until the third week of August at all. Elsewhere, Watkins (12.4% owned) missed Villa's entire Asia tour — he'll probably start, but "probably" plus no pre-season is not a GW1 profile we pay £8.0m for.

Then there's the rotation tax at the new-manager clubs. Guéhi and O'Reilly sit in nearly a quarter of drafts each, but Maresca has four centre-halves for two shirts and Gvardiol owns the left side — someone popular is getting benched in week one and nobody knows who. Rogers (30.5% owned) cost a British-record fee in July and will surely be central to Alonso's Chelsea eventually; the honest problem is that nobody has seen Alonso's Chelsea. Thirty percent of the game is paying £7.5m for a role that doesn't exist on paper yet.

And two the model just won't pay for. Raya is the most-owned keeper in the game at 30.8%, and Kelleher does the same job for £1.0m less with a kinder opener. That £1.0m is half the gap between a bench body and Brobbey. Isak is the awkward one: the reporting says he's fit, first-choice and taking Liverpool's centre-forward role, and our own team-news sweep agrees — but his numbers are coming off an injury-wrecked season, and at £9.0m he'd be the most expensive benefit-of-the-doubt in the game. If he looks right at Newcastle, he's the first transfer we'll be writing about. We'd rather buy the proof than the promise.

Deadline: Friday 21 August, 6:30pm UK time. Check the live build before you lock anything in — template-heavy, differential-chasing or captain-first, it will re-solve the squad around whichever way you lean.