The FPLCore Power Rankings: What ELO Tells Us About 100,000 Managers
We rated 108,090 FPL managers using ELO. The highest-rated manager in the community isn’t even close to the highest overall rank.
Over 100,000 managers from the FPLCore community, all starting at an identical 1500 ELO, matched in five Swiss-style H2H duels every gameweek from GW1 to GW28. Each match paired opponents within their own division, so every result was a genuine test against someone playing at a similar level. After 28 gameweeks the gap between the best and worst had blown out to over 2,150 ELO points, and the 30th-best manager in the world by overall rank only sits 10th on our leaderboard.
Why ELO?
Overall rank tells you where you sit in a pile of 12 million managers but says nothing about whether you’re consistently outperforming the people around you. A 55-point week when the average is 40 is great, a 55 when the average is 60 is weekend-ruining, and overall rank treats both identically because it just adds the numbers up.
That’s what ELO actually measures. Every gameweek you’re matched against five opponents at a similar rating and your score decides whether you climb or fall. Beat a higher-rated manager and you gain more points, lose to someone below you and you drop harder. Over 28 gameweeks that relentless calibration starts to separate genuine skill from variance, and consistent decision-makers from managers who got lucky early and coasted on template momentum.
Everyone started at 1500. We let it run from GW1 to GW28.
Where the 100,000+ Managers Come From
FPLCore doesn’t ask 100,000 managers to sign up individually. We don’t even require an account, you can just enter your manager ID and start using the site. Shameless plug but get your manager report here.
The dataset grows through the leagues our users connect to FPLCore. When someone imports their mini-leagues we pull the full league tables (for leagues under 100 managers) and add every team in those competitions to the database. From that point we track each manager’s activity every week, transfers, captain choices, chip usage.
So the 108,090 managers in this analysis aren’t a curated sample. They’re the collection of real teams that exist inside the leagues our community tracks every week. If you play in a mini-league with someone who uses FPLCore, there’s a decent chance your team is already in the system.
There is one important bias to acknowledge. Managers who use tools like FPLCore tend to be more engaged than the average FPL player, which means the average points in this dataset are likely a bit higher than the global average. It also goes some way to explaining why I’m performing so badly against most of them.
The Great Separation
By GW28 the ELO ratings had spread from 303 to 2,456 and five tiers had emerged. In chess terms that’s roughly the gap between a grandmaster and someone who just learned how the knight moves. Nobody in the dataset has reached Magnus Carlsen territory yet but the spread is already enormous.
| Division | ELO Range | Managers | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond | 1700+ | 23,864 | 22.1% |
| Gold | 1600-1699 | 13,880 | 12.8% |
| Silver | 1400-1599 | 32,288 | 29.9% |
| Bronze | 1300-1399 | 13,773 | 12.7% |
| Coal | Below 1300 | 24,285 | 22.5% |
Silver holds the largest share at 29.9% but that number has been shrinking every week as the system pushes managers toward the rating they actually deserve. The tails have fattened considerably since the early weeks, Diamond and Coal each holding over 22% of the community compared to around 13% at GW13. After 28 gameweeks the system has had enough data to find real, persistent differences in how 108,000 people play this game. The middle ground is emptying out.
Diamond: Where Points and ELO Diverge
To sit above 1700 you need to consistently beat opponents who are themselves beating everyone around them, and sustaining that across 28 gameweeks is something only a very specific kind of manager pulls off.
| Rank | Team | Manager | ELO | Total Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ALIREZA | Alireza Zafari | 2,456 | 1,758 |
| 2 | Taro Mochi | Nick worawong | 2,443 | 1,696 |
| 3 | HoneyBadger | Olawale Akinyele | 2,433 | 1,714 |
| 4 | VARchester United | Benji Gruskin | 2,419 | 1,706 |
| 5 | HuntersField FC | Craig Hunter | 2,416 | 1,734 |
| 6 | ARTETATTACKK LADS! | Roshan Aryal | 2,410 | 1,696 |
| 7 | Taima XI | Thamjeed Ahamad | 2,408 | 1,703 |
| 8 | Mandy’s Mags | Michael Jones | 2,402 | 1,749 |
| 9 | Wirtz Nightmare | Curtis Botham | 2,398 | 1,765 |
| 10 | Noche | Phisan Kaewlee | 2,398 | 1,825 |
Look at the bottom of that table. Phisan Kaewlee’s “Noche” has 1,825 total points and sits 30th in the entire world by overall rank (at time of writing), but ELO rates him 10th in our community. Meanwhile Alireza Zafari leads the ELO table from overall rank 1,952 with 67 fewer total points. 67 points at this stage of the season is a massive gap, and yet ELO rates Alireza higher because total points aren’t the same thing as consistently beating the people around you week after week.
ELO rewards the manager who scores 55 in a week where their five opponents all scored 48. Overall rank rewards the manager who scores 80 when everyone scored 75. And from what I’ve found, you won’t find most of these managers on FPL Twitter with 50k followers or trying to get me to sign up for Fantasy Hub. They’re from Tehran, Lagos, Kathmandu, all over the world, quietly excellent operators who never go viral but somehow always have the right captain when it counts.
The Behavioural Gap
The divisions don’t just differ in points. They differ in how they play the game, and the patterns aren’t what you’d expect. This will be a fairly high-level overview. If there’s interest I can break down each league separately.
The Hits Curve
| Division | Avg Hits (pts) |
|---|---|
| Diamond | 20.7 |
| Gold | 23.1 |
| Silver | 25.0 |
| Bronze | 27.5 |
| Coal | 21.3 |
This genuinely surprised me. Diamond and Coal take almost identical hits across 28 gameweeks, 20.7 and 21.3 points respectively, while the middle divisions take the most. Bronze burns 27.5 points on transfer costs while sitting in the second-lowest tier and Silver isn’t far behind at 25.0.
The managers stuck in the middle are spending the most and getting the least for it. Diamond managers are selective, they build squads that don’t need emergency surgery and use wildcards to restructure when the fixtures demand it rather than bleeding 4-point hits every other week. Coal managers also take relatively few hits but for a completely different reason: a significant chunk of them aren’t playing at all. 4.6% of Coal managers have used exactly 15 unique players all season, meaning they set a team in GW1 and haven’t made a single transfer since. Diamond has zero dead teams.
The Chip Gap
| Division | Chips/Manager |
|---|---|
| Diamond | 4.74 |
| Gold | 4.28 |
| Silver | 3.69 |
| Bronze | 2.82 |
| Coal | 2.00 |
Nothing else in the data splits the divisions this cleanly.
All used chips reset after GW19, which means every unused chip from the first half was a wasted asset you were getting back anyway. Diamond managers understood this and deployed their wildcards, triple captains, bench boosts and free hits when the fixtures lined up rather than saving them for some mythical perfect gameweek that never arrives. At 4.74 chips per manager, Diamond has burned through most of their first-half allocation and already started on the second. Coal sits at 2.00. The average Coal manager barely used half their first-half chips.
Captain and Squad Decisions
Diamond managers picked 7.4 unique captains across 28 gameweeks compared to Coal’s 5.3. “Never get fancy” is how I’ve always played, and for the most part that’s meant sticking the armband on my beloved Haaland every week. But here we can see that Diamond managers do get fancy, and it’s paid off.
The squad composition gap is even wider. Diamond managers have used 57.0 unique players compared to Coal’s 40.4, a 17-player difference that reflects how actively Diamond managers spot form changes early and bring in the right players at the right time. Coal squads are near-static, slowly falling behind the meta as the season evolves around them.
The Consistency Paradox
You’d expect Diamond managers to be the most consistent scorers, steady weeks with no drama. It’s actually the opposite.
Diamond has a weekly score standard deviation of 16.0 while Coal sits at 14.3. The best managers in the community are actually more volatile, they’re making aggressive captain picks and transfer decisions that produce higher highs alongside occasional lows rather than playing it safe for a mediocre but stable floor. Diamond averages 58.2 points per gameweek to Coal’s 48.5 and those extra 9.7 points per week come from taking calculated risks that don’t always pay off but compound massively over a full season.
The Influencer Check
We cross-referenced our ELO ratings against the 40 FPL influencers tracked in the FPLCore community. Good news for the content creator crowd.
27 of the 40 sit in Diamond, eight in Gold, five in Silver. Zero in Bronze or Coal. Let’s Talk FPL leads the way at community rank 73 with an ELO of 2,303 which puts them in the top 0.07% of the entire community. FPL Banger sits at rank 92 with 2,289. FML FPL, with a name that’s basically self-deprecating about their own FPL ability, still comfortably holds Diamond at 1,726.
The lone outlier is FPL Juice, sitting in Silver at 1,416, ranked 67,758th. Even the worst-performing influencer in our community is still above average.
Obviously there’s survivorship bias here, managers who build an audience around FPL tend to be deeply engaged with the game, and engagement predicts ELO better than anything else in this dataset. But it does confirm that the people giving you captain advice are, for the most part, significantly better than the average manager at actually playing the game.
Full Disclosure
I should probably mention that both of us building FPLCore ran our own teams through this system, and the results are not exactly a glowing endorsement of equal skill levels inside the team.
Victor’s Ice Cole sits at 1,720 ELO, which puts him in Diamond, ranked 21,531st out of 108,090. Top 19.9% of the community. Mine, On the V-Ollie!, sits at 1,169 ELO. That’s Coal, ranked 97,109th. Bottom 10.2%. So if FPLCore is powered by two people, one of them looks like a grandmaster and the other looks like he only just learned how the pieces move, despite having played for about ten years.
Victor’s numbers are annoyingly solid. He’s averaging 58.1 points per gameweek, basically dead on the Diamond average of 58.2, which is usually a sign that someone belongs there rather than just catching a run at the right time. He’s taken just 4 points in hits across 29 gameweeks, used 5 chips, gone with 6 different captains, and only used 50 unique players, which is actually below the Diamond average. It’s a very controlled profile. Not passive, not chaotic, just measured. Even his weekly variance is lower than most of Diamond, which suggests he’s not getting there through wild swings every week. He still has the big scores in him, he’s just much better at picking the moments.
Then there’s me.
My profile reads more like a warning label. 51.6 points per gameweek, which sounds nearly respectable until you realise the people beating me are averaging around 58. I also took just one hit all season, but unlike Victor that wasn’t discipline so much as me refusing to make decisions. I’ve had five different captains across 28 gameweeks, used 5 chips, and somehow cycled through 68 unique players, which is actually more than the Diamond average of 57. So I’ve managed the rare combination of being both too passive and too chaotic. Fewer good decisions, more random movement. Just vibes and panic wildcards.
Statistically speaking, Victor looks like the kind of manager this system rewards. I look like the kind of manager this article is warning about. Which is probably a healthy dynamic for the site. One of us can build the rankings, the other can serve as a live demo of what happens when you ignore them.
What Comes Next
This is the first 28 gameweeks of a system that will run across the full season and reset for next year. Every manager in the FPLCore community now has their own ELO rating, their own division, and a trajectory showing exactly when they climbed, when they fell and what decisions drove each move.
Overall rank tells the world where you sit. ELO tells you if you’ve earned it.
I have not.