By Richard Humphreys |
When the Premier League season kicks off on 21 August 2026, the more than 13 million players who participate in Fantasy Premier League (FPL) will have a new AI tool to help them play the game.
Each FPL manager starts with a £100 million budget to pick a squad of 15 players from across the league to try and score the most points throughout the campaign, through their players scoring goals, making assists, keeping clean sheets, and more. They also have various ‘chips’ they can use to double a players’ score, make as many transfers in one week and more.
This season, players will be able to use the Fantasy Premier League Companion, which is powered by Microsoft Copilot and built using Microsoft Foundry. It uses Azure OpenAI, Chat GPT 5.4 and official data from the Premier League to offer advice, answer questions and provide suggestions to managers as they build and maintain their squads.
“The FPL Companion builds on the existing Premier League Companion, which is an AI-powered conversational interface, and it’s really an opportunity for FPL managers and people who have started to play fantasy for the first time to better understand the game, to get better access to information in a way that’s conversational and is easy to understand,” said Andy Selby, senior gaming manager at the Premier League.
“It also allows for more engaged players to really dig in on data and make that easily accessible. If you’ve played any level of fantasy sports, you’ll know there is a depth of data that exists in any sport and FPL is no different. There are a bunch of metrics that are very specific to the FPL game itself. And so, we’ve given Copilot access to all of that. But the managers of the teams remain in control of their own squads.”
FPL managers will be able to ask basic questions like, ‘who should I have in my team this week?’ or be more specific: ‘I’m interested in bringing strikers in, who are the options that I should consider based on shots in the box?’. FPL Companion will provide a contextually relevant answer to any appropriate question.
“The role of FPL Companion is to help you make better, informed decisions,” said Selby. “If I had someone on my team and he’s injured, Companion might say, okay, you could look at [Chelsea’s] Cole Palmer, or [Arsenal’s] Bukayo Saka or [Manchester City’s] Antoine Semenyo. It will always give you a number of options. It will give you the relevant data to back it up. It will link to a relevant editorial where we’ve tackled similar questions, but you then as the manager are going to go and make that decision.”
FPL Companion comprises of two sets of data: match and game. The match data is goals, assists, appearances, cards, minutes on the pitch and more – the things that happen in matches. “That is information which you can access already, but you need to know where to look for it,” said Selby. “You need to know how to navigate the tables. That being accessible through Companion is a bit of a gamechanger to quickly finding and digesting that information.”
The game data relates to many aspects, including the number of transfers that a player has had, the number of managers that have captained a certain player, the number of managers that have played certain chips. “That stuff you can only get through Fantasy Premier League,” said Selby. “You are taking those two data sets and pulling that together to give recommendations. When I’m asking, ‘my player is injured, who should I bring in as a replacement?’ Companion is able to bring together those two data sets and say, here is the performance of the last six game weeks, which players are popular and which players may have the best fixtures.”
Read the full interview with Selby, written by Elliott Smith, on the Microsoft website.