Protect
Template captain
Lock in the obvious pick. Avoid needless variance.
SmartPlay tells you who to captain, who to transfer, and who to bench — every gameweek. Picks that adapt to your actual mini-league rivals.
Free access through 30 September 2026. No card required.
25,234
player scores audited
95.2%
of a perfect season XI

No spreadsheets. No black box. Link your team and SmartPlay does the analysis — you make the call.
01
Connect your FPL side and mini-league in seconds. Nothing to install.
02
Protect a lead, play balanced, or chase rank. Every pick adapts to your choice.
03
Get captain, transfer, and bench calls ranked by expected points. You decide.
v12 validation
Four walk-forward test windows from 2025-26. Every test gameweek comes after the data used to train that fold, so the benchmark reflects unseen matches.
Walk-forward benchmark
25,234 player-gameweeks · 32 GWs
MAE
0.979
avg absolute miss
Spearman
0.729
full-pool ranking
NDCG@10
0.380
top-pick ranking
Decision score
0.555
rank + top picks
Error consistency
32 of 32
v12 had lower MAE than v11 in every evaluated gameweek: 0.979 vs 0.994 on average.
Top-pick ranking
+0.028
Mean NDCG@10 gain over v11. The 95% bootstrap interval is +0.005 to +0.052.
Combined decision score
+0.014
Mean gain in the 50/50 Spearman and NDCG@10 selection metric; 95% interval +0.002 to +0.027.
Season recap · XI audit · 2025/26
We added up SmartPlay's weekly xPts for every player across all 38 gameweeks, then picked the highest-scoring legal 3-4-3 XI from that list. Below, we compare it to the XI you'd build with perfect hindsight — the players who actually scored the most.
This shows whether the AI got the long-term player calls right. It isn't a recommendation to start the same 11 every week.
Headline result
95.2%
of the points a perfect-hindsight XI scored.
SmartPlay's XI banked 2,047 real FPL points across the season — 103 short of the best possible 3-4-3 (2,150 points).
The numbers
Gold ✓ on a jersey means the player is also in the perfect-hindsight XI.
SmartPlay XI scored
2,047
real points
Perfect XI scored
2,150
real points
Gap to perfect
103
points (4.8% short)
Players also in perfect XI
8 of 11
same names
Most FPL tools give every manager the same advice. SmartPlay’s picks adapt to the exact rivals you’re trying to beat. This is the part nobody else does.
Strategy
Each mode rewires the captain, transfer, and chip recommendations — without you touching the underlying model.
Protect
Lock in the obvious pick. Avoid needless variance.
Balanced
Highest expected points without forcing risk.
Chase
Lower-owned pick for rank separation.
Mini-league toolkit
See which players each rival is captaining this gameweek.
How much rank you stand to gain from your low-owned picks.
How much of your team matches the league consensus right now.
See high-owned rival picks you do not own and the exposure if they haul.
Focus the read on reachable rivals instead of distant managers.
Keep the points gap in view while you choose protect, balanced, or chase mode.
Rival-aware picks that shift with your league — recomputed every gameweek.
Open the mini-league lensA top 0.4% all-time FPL manager and an AI/ML engineer trained at Oxford and Berkeley. Both use SmartPlay every gameweek.

Alish
Product & FPL strategy

Qazy
AI, Design & Engineering
Start free now. Your access runs through 30 September 2026; no card required today. Pay once through PayPal only if you want to keep access after that.
Full Season
Most popular · Limited dealUntil the end of the 2026/27 season
Half Season
Limited dealHalf-season access
Free access runs through 30 September 2026 for launch signups — every account gets at least 10 free days. After that: one-time payment only. Half Season customers can upgrade to Full Season for $29 from Account. No recurring payments or auto-renewal.
Three things you won't find together anywhere else. First: the mini-league lens — recommendations change based on the specific managers you're competing with, not a generic top-1k consensus. Second: three one-click strategy modes (Protect, Balanced, Chase) that reshape captain, transfer, and chip decisions around your actual rank position. Third: a fully documented model — xPts, OFR, FRR, all explained at /under-the-hood. Most tools either pick for you in a black box or hand you a spreadsheet to interpret alone. SmartPlay does neither.
When you link a mini-league, four things kick in. Captain coverage shows whether your armband moves with the field or creates a swing after the deadline. Transfer and squad advice factor in rival ownership and template gaps, so a good buy can become more or less urgent depending on your league. Differential edge compares your low-owned picks against template alternatives. And leader-gap context shows which rivals shape the analysis. This is the wedge — everything else flows from it.
Honest answer: it depends on whether you use it. SmartPlay gives you a model evaluated on 25,234 player-gameweeks across 32 leakage-controlled walk-forward gameweeks, rival-aware recommendations, and a documented framework that the recent FPL champions all describe as part of their own process. What you still bring: discipline, patience, and the willingness to occasionally override the model. We don't promise top-10k — anyone promising that is lying. We promise tools that make better decisions easier.
You still play. SmartPlay is a co-pilot, not autopilot. Every recommendation comes with the reasoning behind it — you can agree, override, or use the tool only on the decisions you actually want help with (captain only, transfers only, or all of it). The 2023/24 and 2024/25 FPL champions both describe analytics as one input alongside form, fixtures, news, and gut feel. SmartPlay is built to be the smartest input, not the only one.
Yes — and mid-season is often the smartest time. The model uses past-season data plus the current season's live data, so it's never starting from scratch. By the time you're halfway through, you know where you stand in your mini-league, your free hits are spent, and the run-in to GW38 is where most rank movement actually happens. The limited-deal price applies whether you join in GW1 or GW28.
Start with free launch access through 30 September 2026 (every account gets at least 10 free days), no card required. If you want to keep access after that, checkout runs through PayPal. SmartPlay plans are one-time payments: Full Season is $49 until the end of the 2026/27 season; Half Season is $29 for the first half of it (through December). Half Season customers can upgrade to Full Season later for $29 to get the rest. There are no recurring payments and no auto-renewal.
The SmartPlay journal

5 August 2026
No Salah, two players above £10.0m, and a World Cup hangover. The strangest GW1 draft in years — here's all 15 players we recommend, bench order included, and the two big names we left out.

4 August 2026
Multi-season research says the same managers finish high at rates chance can't produce. Here's the proof the process matters, the survivorship traps in every champion interview, and the rank-context rule that ties it all together. Part three of three.
Link your team, pick a strategy, and get your first set of calls in under two minutes.
Free access through 30 September 2026. No card required. No auto-renewal.