FPL Draft league rules: waivers, trades and scoring

FPL Draft is a separate game mode from Classic Fantasy Premier League, run by the same official FPL platform. The core difference is ownership: in Classic, every manager can pick any player for a shared budget, so the same star player can sit in thousands of squads at once. In Draft, each Premier League player can be owned by only one team in the league at a time — once a manager drafts or claims a player, nobody else in that league can have them until they are dropped or traded away.

There is no budget and no player prices in Draft. Squads are built entirely through the draft, free agent waivers and trades rather than by spending a fixed sum, so value is about roster construction and weekly decisions rather than price management. Draft also drops several Classic mechanics entirely — there is no captain, no vice-captain and none of Classic's chips (Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost, Triple Captain); more on that below.

Both games score players identically; what changes is how you get them and what you can do with them each Gameweek.

• Ownership. Classic: any number of managers can own the same player. Draft: one owner per player per league.
• Building the squad. Classic: a £100m budget and player prices. Draft: a live draft, then waivers, free agency and trades — no budget, no prices.
• Changes during the season. Classic: free transfers, with a points hit for extra ones. Draft: waiver claims, free-agent signings and trades between managers, with no points cost.
• Captain and chips. Classic: a captain, vice-captain and chips. Draft: none of them.
• League format. Classic: total points across a league of any size. Draft: small private leagues played head-to-head or on Classic-style total points.

Before the season starts, every manager in the league fills their squad in one live draft session at a time the league's administrator schedules. The pick order is either randomised or set to reverse league standings, and it runs as a snake draft: the order reverses each round, so the manager who picked last in round one picks first in round two, and so on, keeping no single manager permanently ahead.

A manager does not have to catch every pick in real time — the game auto-picks on their behalf if they run out of time or are away for part of the draft, using their pre-set watchlist first and their overall draft rankings if no watchlist was set. The draft continues until every manager's squad is full; any player nobody drafted becomes a free agent, available to be claimed afterwards through waivers.

A Draft squad holds 15 players, in the same positional split as Classic FPL:

• 2 goalkeepers
• 5 defenders
• 5 midfielders
• 3 forwards

Because ownership is exclusive, a squad can only ever be built from players not already held by another team in the same league — the pool of available options narrows as the draft and the season progress.

Each gameweek, a manager starts 11 of their 15 players and leaves four on the bench. The starting XI must include exactly one goalkeeper, at least three defenders and at least one forward, leaving the rest free to arrange as any valid shape — 3-4-3, 3-5-2, 4-3-3, 4-4-2, 4-5-1, 5-3-2 and 5-4-1 are all legal. If a starter doesn't play at all, the next eligible bench player whose position keeps the formation valid is substituted in automatically, in the bench order the manager set.

Unlike Classic FPL, a Draft squad has no captain and no vice-captain — nobody scores double points, so every starter's points count once, at face value. Draft also has none of Classic's chips: no Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost or Triple Captain. The season is played straight through on the squad a manager drafted, traded for and claimed off waivers, without a single boosted gameweek to lean on.

Points are earned the same way as Classic FPL — appearance points, goals, assists, clean sheets, saves, defensive contributions, bonus points, and deductions for yellow/red cards, own goals and missed penalties, all scored from each player's actual match events. Draft does not apply any points penalty for making transfers, since there is no transfer budget to manage in the first place — the cost of adding a player is losing the roster spot of whoever gets dropped, not a points hit.

Any player nobody currently owns is a free agent — either never drafted, or dropped by a previous owner. A dropped or newly-added player is not instantly available, though: it first goes through a weekly waiver round, where managers submit requests rather than grabbing players first-come-first-served. Waiver priority is based on league position, with lower-ranked managers getting first claim — before the season's first waiver round, priority runs in reverse of the draft order, so whoever picked last gets first priority. A successful claim drops that manager to the bottom of the priority order, giving everyone else a turn before they can claim again. Once a week's waiver round is processed, whatever is left over becomes instantly signable as a free agent until the next round.

Managers can also exchange players directly through trades — always a like-for-like swap of equal numbers of players in matching positions (e.g. one midfielder and one forward for one midfielder and one forward), proposable any time up to that week's waiver deadline. What happens once both sides agree depends on a setting the league's administrator locks in before the draft, one of four options:

• No trades — trading is switched off for the league entirely.
• All trades — an accepted trade is processed immediately.
• Administrator approval — an accepted trade can still be vetoed by the league admin.
• Manager approval — an accepted trade can be vetoed by the rest of the league; it's blocked if half or more of the other managers object.

Under either approval setting, the deadline to accept moves to 24 hours before the waiver deadline, and a trade nobody explicitly rejects by then goes through automatically. Once a trade is accepted, it cannot be cancelled.

A league's administrator picks how the standings work, from two options. In Head-to-Head, each gameweek pairs a manager against one other team in the league, and whoever's starting XI scores more points wins that matchup (equal scores are a draw); results build a table on match points — the common convention is 3 for a win and 1 for a draw — much like a traditional sports league, and some leagues add a knockout playoff among the top teams once the head-to-head schedule finishes. In Classic scoring, there are no weekly matchups at all — every manager's gameweek points simply add to a single running total across the season, the same format as Classic FPL, just played with a drafted squad instead of a budget one.

Before each gameweek's first kickoff, every manager sets their starting XI and bench order. The FPL Draft deadline is 90 minutes before the opening match of the Gameweek; changes made after it apply to the following round. Waiver claims are processed 24 hours before that deadline, after which remaining players can be signed in Free Agency.

The league administrator can schedule up to three additional drafts during the season. These redrafts refresh squads without changing the current league standings and must be scheduled before the preceding Gameweek.