I’ve been playing Fantasy Premier League in some form or another for over 20 years. I’ve never been the type of FPL manager who dives too deeply into advanced stats, but in the past I have made use of tools that help rank teams’ upcoming fixtures by difficulty, especially when looking to play a Wildcard, Free Hit or if there are upcoming double and blank game weeks.
Most FPL fixture planners either hide advanced controls behind subscriptions or overload the interface with statistics I don’t personally need. So I decided to build my own. Initially I just hosted this on my Raspberry Pi for personal use, but I figured I might as well put it out for general consumption, so I launched FPLFixtureDifficulty.com, a free Fantasy Premier League fixture difficulty planner and team comparison tool.
From a technical perspective it’s a fairly simple stack. The official Fantasy Premier League website provides their fixture difficulty ratings through an API, so I fetch those and cache them for an hour in Laravel, then the interface with the sortable table and game week selectors is built using Tailwind 4 and Alpine.js.
The team and player images are also from the official site, but I resize and reformat them in Laravel so they’re more performant.
Clicking on a team row expands it to show the top-scoring, most-selected, and highest-form players for that club, which are also pulled through from the official site. Finally I added the ability to enter your team ID and the interface will show how your current team lines up with the Fixture Difficulty Table.
I’ll probably tweak and play with some additional settings and features, especially if I come up with personal functionality that I would use myself.
The aim was to keep the interface fast, simple, and genuinely useful during weekly FPL planning without hiding key functionality behind a subscription.
I’ve also added a feedback form, so if you can think of any additional functionality you’d find useful, drop a message in there and I’ll see what I can do.
Current features:
- Fixture difficulty rankings by gameweek
- Double and blank gameweek planning
- Wildcard and Free Hit planning
- Team comparison view
- Player form and ownership data
- Team ID lookup to compare your squad against fixture difficulty
If you write about Fantasy Premier League, build FPL tools, or create content around upcoming gameweeks, feel free to share the site or link to it if you find it useful.