Is Using An FPL Tool Cheating?

1. Start with a free tool, such as a team rater or a planner, before paying for anything.
2. Never hand over your FPL password. Your team ID is all a tool needs.
3. Treat a tool's advice as a second opinion, then make the final call yourself.
4. Compare what each tool does for you, not just the monthly price.

When someone asks if using an FPL tool is cheating, they usually mean one of two things. Either it feels like an unfair edge over friends who just go on gut feel, or it feels like the tool is playing the game for them.

Neither quite holds up. Fantasy Premier League is free to play, and the information it works with is there for everyone. A tool doesn't unlock anything secret. It organises numbers, fixtures and news so you can think about them sooner and more clearly.

Cheating normally means breaking a rule or getting at something you shouldn't. Reading your own squad through your team ID, or looking at a projection, doesn't do either of those.

Think of it like a football fan reading a match preview before a bet with mates, or a manager checking a fixture list before a big decision. Planning is part of fantasy football. Tools just make that planning quicker.

There's also the practical side. No tool needs your FPL password to read your team, because the team ID is enough. That ID is the number in the web address of your Points page on the official FPL site. If a tool is only reading what you could read yourself, it isn't getting into anywhere it shouldn't.

One more detail is worth knowing. FPL publishes every manager's picks only after the deadline passes, so between deadlines any tool reads the squad FPL last locked. Nobody is peeking at rivals' unannounced moves.

A tool can tell you how it rates a player. It can't know that you're chasing a mini-league rival, that you fancy a punt, or that you'd rather not take a hit this week. Those are your calls.

The decisions that matter are all still yours:

• Each gameweek you get free transfers, and extra transfers cost four points each. Whether a move is worth a hit is a judgement about your own risk.
• The chips are the Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost and Triple Captain. When to use them depends on your squad and your plans.
• Captaincy is a bet you place every week, with or without a projection beside it.

So a tool doesn't take the game off you. At best it gives you a better-informed second opinion.

Prices below are as listed on 25 October 2026. Each suits a different kind of manager.

• Fantasy Football Scout: articles, community, podcast and data tools. Assistant Scout is free, with key articles, news, community, basic fixture data and a team rating. Chief Scout is £3.25 a month, billed annually. It suits people who like reading and discussion alongside the numbers.
• Fantasy Football Hub: an AI and expert platform with AI transfers, a team rating, a planner and podcasts. The AI team rating is free (email needed). Starter is £2.49 a month, billed yearly, which is a 50%-off sale price.
• FPL Review: projections, a planner and a transfer solver. The free projection model in the planner costs nothing, and paid access is through Patreon. It suits people who like to dig into projections themselves.
• LiveFPL: live rank, price predictor, planner and ticker, all free. There's an optional subscription to remove ads. It suits anyone who mainly wants live tracking.
• Fantasy Football Fix: data tools, AI transfers, ChatFPL and articles. A free account is available, and Premium is £3.48 a month, billed yearly (a limited-time price). ChatFPL lets you chat about your team.

Of the tools above, only Fantasy Football Fix lists an AI chat about your team. Scout and Hub don't list one, and FPL Review and LiveFPL say no. None of the five publishes an accuracy figure, so be wary of anyone promising certainty.

If you want to keep things above board, a few habits help.

Never give a tool your FPL password. A tool that needs only your team ID has everything it needs to read your squad. If something asks for more, that's a reason to stop and think.

Don't treat a projection as a promise. Football is noisy, and every tool, ours included, will miss sometimes. A tool that shows its misses is easier to trust than one that only shows hits.

And if you're in a league with friends who have agreed to play without tools, respect that. That's a house rule between mates, and it's a perfectly fair one. It's a different thing from the official game.

Fantasy Football IQ (FFIQ) gives you projections for every player and the move for your own team before every deadline: captain, transfers, chips and line-up. It also has Ask IQ, an AI you can ask anything about your team. Our one line on method: every call combines 34 calculations with an algorithm that keeps updating as the scenario changes.

Without an account you get a projection for every player six gameweeks ahead, predicted line-ups, the weekly captain and transfer calls, and a free team rater, FPL Rate My Team. Premium adds your move in the War Room, IQ, your mini-leagues, and price-rise alerts for your players the night before.

We're not the cheapest. Premium is £5.99 a month (the Founding Season price, 60% off the standard £14.99), or £59.99 a year. The first month is free, a card is needed, and you can cancel any time. We publish our record too: picks made before each deadline and scored on FPL's results, misses included. We never ask for your FPL password, and a Scout member can run FFIQ alongside their Scout membership.

Try it on your team →Every free FPL tool →