Ten years of FPL winners: what the data actually says

Ask most managers what it takes to win Fantasy Premier League outright and you will hear some version of "years of experience and a huge amount of knowledge."

The record says otherwise. Read what the champions actually did, week by week, and a handful of habits keep coming back. None of them is knowing more than you do. One winner did the opposite of all of them and won a different trophy, which turns out to be the most useful finding here.

The winners

Finding 1: experience is not the entry fee

Erik Ibsen, the 2025/26 champion, was playing his first ever season. He started because his sister asked for help with her work-league team. He went from roughly eight million overall to first, reaching the top 100 by Gameweek 21.

Lovro Budišin, the 2024/25 champion, had played five seasons. His previous best finish was 508,000th.

This is a tendency rather than a law. Ali Jahangirov finished 215th the year before he won in 2022/23, which is a genuine pedigree. Two of the last three champions had no record worth speaking of, though, and there is no ladder of steadily improving ranks leading to the title.

Whatever the entry fee is, it is not years served.

Finding 2: about a third of a winning score is one decision a week

This is the number that should change how you spend your Sunday.

• Budišin took 819 points from the armband, 29.1% of his total.
• Jahangirov took 758, averaging 20.5 a gameweek, and finished 42 points clear of the next-best captain picker in the game.

Jahangirov puts the cost of getting it wrong plainly: "if you end up captaining the wrong player, you're basically losing 10 to 15 points each Gameweek."

Neither of them found a magic captain. Budišin captained Salah 23 times and rotated the rest: Palmer five, Mbeumo three, Isak twice, plus one-week picks on Son, Saka, Watkins and Marmoush. The one-offs were fixture calls, and they paid. Son returned 32 points the only week he wore it.

Jahangirov's rule is the useful part, because it tells you when to gamble:

Chasing a rank you want? Take the differential captain. Protecting one you have? Take the one everybody else has and stop thinking about it.

Michael Coone, the 2020/21 champion, would go further. His own advice afterwards was "don't take risks with the captaincy", and his title is the argument for it. He went into Gameweek 38 third, nine points behind, captained Mané for 32 points, and won. The risk that actually decided it was somewhere else entirely: his differential, Hal Robson-Kanu, scored late and denied a rival the clean sheet bonus that would have kept them ahead.

Take your risk in the squad. Take the points off the armband.

Finding 3: champions transfer less than you do

Ibsen took zero points hits across all 38 gameweeks. Not few. None.

"Roll through. I'd rather play the player in a poor fixture than take a hit."

He made no transfer at all in 15 gameweeks, and one in six more. That was not passivity. He was banking moves. Three times (Gameweeks 24, 28 and 36) he spent three free transfers at once to restructure the squad around premiums like Bruno Fernandes, Semenyo and Saka. A whole rebuild, at no cost, because he had waited for it.

Jahangirov cut something else out entirely: chasing price rises. He decided team news and likely starters were worth more attention than squad value, and stopped optimising the number that does not score points.

The buying discipline goes with it. Budišin refused Palmer at £10.5m after the £5.5m season that made him famous, on the grounds that "every season is different", and skipped Haaland at £15.0m, taking Isak and Wood for £14.5m combined. Both finished as top-scoring forwards, and the money he saved bought the captaincy options in Finding 2.

One warning before you adopt this as law. It is the right way to win overall, and a poor way to win anything else. Finding 6 is the counter-example, and it is a strong one.

Finding 4: with chips, the order matters more than the choice

The clearest single decision in ten years of winners belongs to Låbakk in 2023/24.

Faced with Blank Gameweek 29, he played his Wildcard there and kept the Free Hit back for Double Gameweek 34. It returned 143 points.

His nearest rival burned the Free Hit on the blank instead. It returned 19, and 105 in the double.

Same chips. Same season. The order was the difference.

Finding 5: last season the points moved, and the money went the other way

Look at the table again. Ibsen won 2025/26 with 2,582, the lowest winning score in six years, and a 228-point fall on the season before. Nothing else in eleven years drops that far. The previous record was 102, in the season football stopped for three months.

The obvious reading is that it was a hard season. Our own records say the opposite about the points on offer:

2025/26 was the most generous of the three. Strip out the 2,834 points the new defensive contribution rule handed out and it lands on 2.75, exactly 2023/24. The league defended more, scored less, and FPL started paying for the defending.

So far, so unsurprising. The part that cost people the season comes next. Set what each position returned against what the game's collective budget was paying for it:

Defenders have always been slightly underpriced. The gap was +3.9 and +3.6 in the two seasons before. In 2025/26 it more than doubled.

The money moved the wrong way as the evidence piled up. Forwards' share of the league's budget, first six gameweeks against last six:

• 2023/24: 26.7% to 25.7% (−1.0)
• 2024/25: 26.4% to 24.1% (−2.3)
• 2025/26: 24.9% to 27.0% (+2.1)

Two seasons running, managers drifted out of forwards over the year. In the one season where forwards returned their smallest share in three years, they drifted in.

That is why the winning score fell in the highest-scoring season we can measure. The points did not disappear. They moved into a category spread across every defender and holding midfielder in the league, which fifteen slots cannot hoover up, while the field kept buying strikers and hoping.

Ibsen is the exception that proves it. He backed Tarkowski and Caicedo on their defensive numbers from the first gameweek, before the market repriced anything.

(Level matters less than direction here. A five-man line will always out-return a three-man one. It is the change across three seasons that is the signal, and all three are measured the same way.)

Finding 6: the overall title and your mini-league are different games

Everything above is how you win the overall. One manager did the exact opposite and also won something, in the same season.

Bay Dar won the 2021/22 FPL Cup, the knockout run of head-to-head ties inside the game. He did it by taking 31 hits, spending 124 points on transfers, and handing the armband to fifteen different players. Salah got it four times. "Usually I follow my feeling, so I am not afraid to take the risk."

He finished 43,026th overall.

Read those two facts together, because they are the whole argument. The strategy that won him twenty-three straight knockout ties is the strategy that kept him out of the top forty thousand. Nothing about it was a mistake. He was playing a different game.

That is the difference between the two competitions:

• Overall, you are protecting a rank against eleven million people. Variance is the enemy. You win by losing fewer points than the field, which means no hits and the right armband every week. No one has ever won it twice. Ibsen described his own method as wanting to beat the average and letting variance do the rest.
• In a knockout or a mini-league, you have to beat one person, or ten. Matching the field guarantees you finish level with it. Variance is the only thing that separates you, so you have to buy some.

The margins say the same thing from the other end. Coone's title turned on a single late goal from a differential nobody owned. In 2019/20 the top two managers in the world shared three players out of fifteen. At the sharp end, everyone is a differential to everyone else.

So: pick your competition first, then pick your habits. A mini-league is small and mostly casual. Above all it is emotional, which makes it a skill problem, and skill problems reward process applied with more nerve than the overall title would forgive.

What to take from this

1. Decide which competition you are playing. Overall and your mini-league reward opposite nerve. Bay Dar's 31 hits won a cup and cost him forty thousand places.
2. Spend your thinking time on the captain. It is roughly a third of the score. Everything else on this list is smaller.
3. Take your risks in the squad rather than on the armband. Coone won from ninth place back with a safe captain and a differential nobody owned.
4. Stop taking hits, if you are chasing a rank. A −4 needs the incoming player to beat the outgoing by four points before the transfer has done anything for you. Roll it and buy two players next week instead.
5. Ignore price rises. Team news is worth more than squad value, and chasing rises is what makes you take the transfers you regret.
6. Do not pay last season's price for last season's form. The £10.5m version of a £5.5m breakout is a different bet.
7. Plan the chip order. Find the double gameweek first, then work backwards to what has to survive until you reach it.
8. Check where the points actually are before you spend. Last season defenders returned 35% of them on 26% of the budget, and the field responded by buying more strikers.

The last one should be encouraging. You are not behind because you started late. One of the last three champions had never played before. You are behind because your mate has better tools, and that is fixable.

Sources: FPL winners list, Erik Ibsen on his season, Erik Ibsen interview, Lovro Budišin on captaincy, Lovro Budišin on squad building, Jonas Sand Låbakk's title, Ali Jahangirov on captaincy, Ali Jahangirov's win, Bay Dar's FPL Cup run, Michael Coone's title, the 2019/20 run-in.