Rate my FPL team: how the squad rating out of 100 works

Seven weighted checks, every one of them showing its working. No black box, no vibes.

Updated 7 August 2026

How do I rate my FPL team?

Enter your fifteen players — or import them with your Team ID — and the rating scores your squad out of 100 across seven weighted checks, each with a plain-English line explaining where the points went.

The score itself is the least interesting part. What matters is the breakdown: a 78 that loses fifteen points on fixtures is a completely different problem from a 78 that loses them on bench strength, and only one of those is worth spending a transfer on.

What are the seven checks, and what is each worth?

Starting XI strength is worth 30 points, fixture run and value for money 15 each, and captaincy ceiling, bench strength, availability and balance 10 each.

What is a good FPL squad rating?

85 or above is an Elite draft, 70 or above is a Strong squad, 55 or above is Decent with fixable gaps, and anything below that needs work.

These bands are demanding on purpose. The scale is relative to the strongest squad £100m can buy, so scoring in the seventies means you are genuinely competitive rather than average. Very few real teams score in the nineties, because doing so requires being near-optimal on all seven checks at once — and several of them pull against each other.

What is the rating benchmarked against?

The best £100m draft the engine can build, found with a beam search over live prices and projections.

Three of the seven checks — XI strength, value for money and bench strength — are ratios against that squad rather than fixed targets. That matters, because "good" in FPL is not an absolute. A £100m budget in a season where premiums are cheap buys a very different team than one where they are not, and a benchmark that recomputes from live data moves with the market instead of drifting out of date.

The benchmark is built the same way the app's own squad builder works: a beam search that carries the eight strongest squads forward at once and will accept a temporarily worse move, so it can find two-step upgrades — selling a midfielder to afford a premium forward — that a one-swap-at-a-time search can never see.

Why is a squad scored on its XI rather than all fifteen players?

Because that is how FPL pays out: your starting eleven scores, the captain scores twice, and the bench only counts through autosubs and Bench Boost.

Adding up all fifteen players' projections rewards spending money on the bench, which is exactly the wrong instinct. The rating follows the real scoring rules — best legal XI, captain counted twice, and the bench weighted lightly — which is why it correctly praises a squad that loads its money into the eleven and fills the bench with cheap enablers.

It is also why bench strength is a separate 10-point check rather than being folded into the total. Punting the bench is a legitimate strategy, but it has a real cost on autosub weeks and on your Bench Boost. The rating shows you that cost instead of hiding it.

Why does the fixture check use a narrow band?

Because FPL's difficulty ratings are roughly zero-sum across the league, so almost every fifteen-man squad averages close to 3.00.

Full marks come at an average difficulty of 2.75 and the score reaches zero at 3.35. That looks like a tight window, and it is — but it is the range squads can actually reach. A wider band scored on paper and did nothing in practice: every team in the game would have clustered in the middle of it, and the check would have told you nothing.

What the rating will not tell you

It does not model fatigue, it does not know breaking news faster than FPL's own data, and pre-season projections are rough until real minutes exist.

Projections start from FPL's own expected-points estimates, scaled by fixture difficulty and multiplied by a start-chance estimate built from minutes, starts, price rank within the club and FPL's availability flags. That is a good deal better than raw price, and it is nowhere near clairvoyance. Once real gameweeks have been played the inputs sharpen automatically.

Common questions