How it works

You give it a manager ID. It reads the same public data everyone can see, and tells you the three things worth deciding this week - with the reasoning attached, so you can disagree with it.

Getting started

Your manager ID is the number in your own team’s address on the FPL site: fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1234567/event/1. No login is needed and nothing is stored against your name - the ID is public, and the app keeps it in your browser so you do not type it twice.

Signing in with Google is optional. It exists for one reason: so your squad and your league follow you to a second device instead of living in one browser. You can use everything without it.

What each page is for

• My squad - the week’s decisions, and a planner you build moves in. The bulk of the app.
• Live - the gameweek as it happens, your score beside the one the FPL Pirate advised, player by player.
• League - ownership among the people you are actually playing against, which is a different thing from ownership nationally.
• Chips - each chip scored week by week against the weeks you have left.
• Players and Prices - the transfer pool, and who is close to a price change.

The planner

The pitch is the interface. Click any shirt and you get the three things you can do with that player: captain him, make him the vice, or sell him - with a replacement list already filtered to his position and to the money selling him frees. Click a substitute instead and everyone he could come on for lights up.

The dropdown above the pitch changes what each shirt shows: projected points, the coming fixture, price, form, points so far, or how much of the country owns him. Which of those matters depends on what you came to decide - a transfer is a question about prices, a captain is a question about fixtures - and none of them should need another tab.

Moves stack, and the whole stack is costed together, because two transfers share one bank and one points hit. The running total sits above the pitch: transfers used, free transfers left, the hit, and what is left in the bank. Nothing you do here touches your real team - it is a sketchpad.

Turn on a Wildcard or a Free Hit and the hit disappears, however many moves you make. Nothing else changes: the budget, the positions and the three-per-club limit still bind, because they bind on a wildcard too.

Bench Boost and Triple Captain work the other way round. They buy no transfers, so the hit stands - what they change is the score. Under a Bench Boost all fifteen count, and the suggestions are priced over the fifteen instead of the eleven, which usually points them at a different player entirely: the one worth upgrading in an ordinary week is your weakest starter, and the one worth upgrading here is your weakest player. A Free Hit squad lasts a single gameweek, so the roadmap plans the weeks after it from the fifteen that comes back.

Turn on a Free Hit and you can also have the fifteen built for you: the best legal squad your budget could field for that one gameweek. The bench is deliberately the cheapest four who make it legal, because under this chip a substitute scores nothing and money spent on one is money wasted. There is no Wildcard equivalent, and that is on purpose - a wildcard squad has to be right for five or six weeks that no bookmaker has priced, and a confident answer to that would be a guess with a decimal point on it.

Reading the numbers

• xPts is projected points. It comes from fixture difficulty, recent form, minutes played and availability - and from the betting market for matches bookmakers have priced, which is usually the coming gameweek only.
• A transfer’s value is what it changes in the eleven you would field, not the gap between the two players. Selling somebody who was on your bench contributing nothing, for somebody who only displaces your weakest starter, is worth the gap to that starter - which is sometimes nothing at all.
• The suggestion list is several separate answers to “what is the single best move”, each spending the whole bank on its own. The package above it is the best set that actually funds together.
• Now or wait prices a plan against the same plan a week later, when the transfer has banked and the hit may be gone.

FPL Pirate vs You

Every recommendation is written down before the deadline and marked against what actually happened once the gameweek finishes. That scoreboard is the only honest way to judge a tool like this, and it is the reason the app cannot quietly improve its own past advice.

Both sides are scored the way FPL scores a real squad, substitutions and the vice-captain included - otherwise the FPL Pirate would be marked without a bench against a manager who had one.

What it will not tell you

These are projections, not predictions. They are estimates of what is likely across many similar situations, and any single gameweek can make them look foolish. A few limits worth knowing:

• It has no team news beyond what FPL itself publishes - no press conferences, no reporters, no scraped injury feeds.
• A mini-league is sampled, not read whole, so ownership in a large league is an estimate and the page says so.
• A sale is valued at the player’s current price. FPL pays the purchase price plus half the rise, so a squad holding risers raises slightly less than the app assumes - measured at 0.1m to 0.4m.
• Wildcard and Free Hit are never given a projected score, because playing either well means picking a different fifteen. Guessing there would be a number with a decimal point and nothing behind it.

The weekly email

Off unless you ask for it, on your account page. Signing in does not sign you up. Switch it on and you get at most two a gameweek about your own squad, each with a link that stops them for good.

Signed in and never asked, you will see the offer once on your squad page. Answering it either way is the end of it - declining is recorded as a decision, not as a question to put again next week.

Something wrong?

If a number looks wrong it probably is, and it is worth telling me - most of what this app gets right, it got right because somebody said “that does not add up”. Email fplpiratesupport@gmail.com.