Plan your chips, and read theirs

Eight. Each of the four chips — Wildcard, Free Hit, Triple Captain and Bench Boost — comes twice: one for the first half of the season and one for the second. First-half chips expire after Gameweek 19 whether you use them or not, which is the single most common way managers waste one.

You assign each chip to a gameweek. The dropdowns do the thinking that usually happens on a notes app:

• Every gameweek option is annotated as a double or blank where relevant
• Gameweeks already claimed by another of your chips are blocked, so you can't double-book
• Your plan is saved to your account and shows as a timeline across the season
• The fixture difficulty grid sits underneath, colour-coded by team, with your plan overlaid

The point is to see the whole season at once, rather than deciding on a Friday afternoon whether this is finally the Bench Boost week.

Yes — this is the part the official app can't do. The chip matrix is a grid of every manager in your league against all 38 gameweeks, showing exactly which chip they played and when, with double and blank gameweeks marked down the columns and your own plan overlaid.

Alongside it, progress bars per chip show how much of your league has burned each one, split by first and second half.

The planner shows you the fixtures and lets you decide. If you want an actual recommendation, that's the Coach: it solves each chip scenario separately against your real squad and quotes the projected gain over playing a normal week, so you can see whether this is the week or not.

The planner and the league chip matrix are free. The Coach is part of the season pass.

Fixture difficulty and planning work as soon as the fixtures are out. Anything that reads squads — the league chip matrix, live scores, insights — wakes up at the Gameweek 1 deadline, because FPL doesn't publish anyone's team until then.