2026 Champions League Preview

The Groups

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The Fixtures

The Groups

We have three returning Champions League winners – Gloopy Yarbles, Sporting Wicker Park and The Phenoms – hoping to use their experience to gain another title, we have De Bruyne Trousers who were the runners-up in both of the last two tournaments, and seven other teams who have missed out on a place in the Final by just one game. Of those seven defeated semi-finalists, Barons, Bigo1, GoFYS and Smash & Grab (both times) would have won that year if they had got to that final game.

CL History

Group A

The Premier League champions (currently second-placed defending their title) Housewives Favourite are the early favourites to win the Champions League this season. They are third in the Best-ish table, one of three teams to pass the 200-pt mark after just three gameweeks, and recorded this young season’s highscore of 90½. They are currently in possession of the top pointscorer – Bruno Fernandes – and five other goalscorers (six if you include Malick Thiaw!) But, as Wives Fave have experienced over the last five tournaments – even the best campaigns can be scuppered by an ill-timed off-week.

The only other incarnation of Bruno Fernandes in this Champions League is also in Group A, appearing for League Two’s sole representative – CL debutants Wrockwardine Wood Wolves, who also drafted him from second spot. Co-incidentally, both teams also picked up Ismaila Sarr at #22. The Wood Wolves qualified for the Champions League as a Best-ish Reserve with a high overall score last season, scoring over 2,000 matchpoints. Like Housewives, WWW are second in their league tonight after winning their first two games, before losing last weekend (to a team who scored exactly 60FPts, spooky!)

Last season, Barons FC recorded their best-ever progress through the Champions League, reaching the Semi-Finals before being knocked out to the eventual winners The Phenoms. As mentioned above, had the Barons won their Semi-Final, they would’ve outscored either finalist in the CL Final gameweek, but unfortunately it wasn’t to be. After three gameweeks here, Barons are midtable on .500 (1-1-1); they lost to Gp D’s Beyer Neverleusen in GW1, drew with Gp C’s Preliminary Version in GW 2, then won last weekend with an impressive 73-53 over Gp B’s DBT. This week coming they have Gp A’s Housewives Favourite in the league and then re-face them in the CL in GW5.

Season 10 champions, Sporting Wicker Park, suffered a fall from grace after their triumph in December 2023 – they were KO’d in the First Round when defending their title and failed to qualify for the Season 12 tournament. But, as with WWW, they scored too highly not to be included in this season’s tournament and return in Group A (the Group they topped in that title-winning year). Of the four teams in this group, they are the second-best scoring through the first three matches, they were the BFFA’s top-scorers in GW2 with the third-best score of the season so far.

While Wives Fave are hoping to open their CL campaign strongly, they will be facing another Group A rival in the league in GW4. Barons FC were Championship champions last season and were promoted back to the Premier League after two seasons away. They will have back-to-back games with Wives Fave (PL in GW4 and CL in GW5), but they will rejoin the Champions League with a game against newcomers Wrockwardine Wood Wolves.

Previous meetings:

The BFFA Cup winners and the BFFA Premier League Champions will raise the curtain on the new tournament next month – Sporting Wicker Park and Housewives Favourite were the first teams drawn out of the pot, and have been set up with meetings in Gameweeks 4 and 9. Housewives played Sporting Wicker Park four times in Season 10 and four times in Season 11, both won two each in both seasons. In that 2023/24 season Wives Fave also won the Premier League and SWP were Cup Semi-Finalists.

Housewives also played Barons four times in Season 10, winning three and drawing once. The two league champions will meet another four times this season in the Premier League, beginning in GW5 (a week after their first CL matchup).

SWP have faced Barons much more often – 22 times so far, first meeting in the opening weekend of Season 5. Surprisingly, all 22 previous games have been league fixtures, and they have a near-even record – Hung have the slightly better record at W11, D1, L10, winning the last one 47½-43.

Group B

How unlucky would you feel if you reached two consecutive Champions League Finals but under-scored in the most important gameweek of the season, AND missed out on the Premier League title on a matchpoints tiebreaker? De Bruyne Trousers are still hurting from exactly that, but come into a new season refreshed and hungry for silverware. They’ve re-hired Arsenal’s Eberechi Eze who scored three goals for them in the second half of last season, including a brace in the London Derby.
DBT have made the final four in all three of their CL involvements but, and we don’t want to jinx it, there’s a lot of quality this year in Group B!

Of the three returning champions, two of them are in this group. One of those is the mighty Gloopy Yarbles who are in the hunt for a third CL crown. After making it to three finals in a row, they somehow couldn’t get reach the Quarter-Finals last year, despite having the fifth-best points tally in the First Round and the second-best in the Second Round – yes, they were paired up against the only team that scored better in the round!
Last week the Yarbles were in the market for new arrivals and signed Ipswich Town’s new forward Emersonn and the £123m headline-grabbing Bradley Barcola. The pair met at Portman Road last week, albeit they only overlapped for about two minutes. Following Emersonn taking a seat on the bench, Barcola set the bar for fastest run in the PL – clocking 35.9 km/h. Shame there’s no bonus points for sprinting.

Next, the reigning champions, the aptly-named The Phenoms, return for another go with some familiar faces – Viktor Gyökeres and Ismaila Sarr were there from start to finish last season as The Phenoms were promoted to the Premier League. The pair scored three of The Phenoms’ seven goals in the Champions League Final last February, so well worth extending their contract. Patrick Dorgu was drafted again, greatly improving on his position from #87 to #38, and Milos Kerkes was also re-drafted after making 21 appearances for The Phenoms in 25/26. Gameweeks 6 & 7 will offer a repeat of last year’s Final with both finalists in Group B; Phenoms obviously won that one (68 – 55½) but have already played and lost to DBT in the opening match of the Premier League, going down 58½-51½.

Amazingly, Whiskey De Bruyne (League One runners-up last season) only used a total of 19 players last season (20 if you include Xhaka’s three unused games on the bench). Their promotion means that they qualify for a third CL tournament and will hope to get over the Quarter-Final disappointment of 2024 where they were knocked out by DBT (above).
Xhaka was rehired and utilised this season, scoring 2½ last week in a 1-pt win, and the defensive trio of Lacroix, Richards and Dias (who all had a full season at WdB) were re-drafted for their Champions League return. In total the three combined for 4 goals, 2 assists and 34 clean sheets across Season 12.

Previous meetings:

De Bruyne Trousers have already met two of their groupmates in the Premier League already. In GW1 they beat The Phenoms by 7 FPts. They will meet again in the CL in Gameweeks 6 & 7. In GW2 they beat Gloopy Yarbles by one and a half scorepoints but last week they were outshone by Group A’s Barons 73-53.

DBT had met The Phenoms only once before that – in that CL Final last season. DBT vs Gloopy has been played ten times already. The last six times have generated wins for the Trousers. And we have had 14 previous De Bruyne derbies. DBT have had the better of their altercations – W7, D1, L5. The first Champions League weekend offers us the next De Bruyne Derby. They last met in Season 11 where they played six times – four times in the Championship and twice here in the Champions League Group Stage. DBT won the first of those two encounters 50-27 and then the following week they drew 33-33. Both sides finished runners-up in their league last season

Finally, Gloopy Yarbles and The Phenoms have not played in the main BFFA league system yet, but have met ten times in the Dynasty league, sharing the spoils at W5, L5 each. The Phenoms (as TrevAI) won the last three, including the 148.25 – 130 barnburner in the penultimate gameweek of last season and the 10-point victory in Gameweek 3 this season. That match was the first of three consecutive fixtures between the two managers – after Trev’s GW3 win they will play in the Champions League this weekend and then in the Championship in GW5.

Group C

Two-time league champions and two-time Best-ish winners Bigo1 returned to the BFFA last season after a six-year hiatus and, albeit after an indifferent start in League Two, were promoted to the third tier and made an immediate return to the Champions League. In their four previous tournaments, they have only once got past the First Round, they reached the final four in 2016. Ten years later, they will attempt to do that again.
Over the summer they kept their faith in Iliman Ndiaye (drafted #54 in 2025 and used throughout their promotion season, scoring 7 from 32 appearances), by picking him #32 as an Evertonian, now of course he plays in sky blue. Brian Brobbey (drafted #72) was also recalled after his end-of-season heroics (which included a goal against Ndiaye’s Everton in their penultimate game).

Hung Like a Bony had a very successful 2023/24 season – winning the Championship, the Best-ish title, the Champion-of-Champions postseason mini-tourney and making the Semi-Finals of the 2023 Champions League. Fast forward three years and they enter the CL having won all three of their opening games (as they did in 2023) and go into the inter-league tourney in good form.
Back in Season 10 they got to the Semi-Finals by knocking out Group C’s Smash & Grab. Last October S&G retaliated by beating Hung LAB in a First Round CL fixture. In total, they have met 12 times previously; Hung have won 6, lost 5 and drawn once.
This season they have renewed contracts for the Arsenal pair of Calafiori and the newly-rehomed Bruno Guimarães who appeared on the Hung teamsheets 19 and 20 times respectively last season.

Preliminary Version haven’t had much luck in the Champions League. They got out of the group in 2023 with a 3-3 record, but were then knocked out in the QF’s on a tiebreaker, after drawing with Gloopy Yarbles 71-all on aggregate. The Yarbles went through by beating Prelim 4-1 on Goals Scored. The following May, Prelim had a chance to get into the next CL through a qualifier for 4th-placed teams, but lost to The Phenoms. Then last year they had a chance to reach the Second Round in the new trial format, but were again knocked out after losing to The Phenoms. Add to that the fact that The Phenoms kept Prelim from the Runners-Up place in the Championship last season by just two points, then it might start to look like Preliminary Version would take a lot of pleasure from exacting some form of revenge…!

Just as Bigo1 did, Preliminary Version drafted Iliman Ndiaye (before he signed for Man City) in both of the last two seasons (at #41 in 2025 and #45 in 2026) and used him throughout 2025/26, including an appearance in their BFFA Cup Final loss in GW38. Now, wearing sky blue, Iliman will be available for both teams when they meet in gameweeks 6 & 7, when City face Liverpool at Anfield and then Ipswich in East Manchester.

Through the first three rounds of league fixtures, the highest-scoring CL team is Smash & Grab with 204½ matchpoints, about 68 points per game. Only Salah and Good Night have scored better, and only by one matchpoint. (Keep an eye out for them, they may be appearing in a write-up like this in twelve months time!) On top of that, no team has scored more matchpoints in Champions League history. In their 70 total games, they have scored 3,119 matchpoints. And only one team has played more CL games – Sporting Wicker Park.
A lot of their recent success has come from Cody Gakpo, a fourth round pick for S&G averaging 10 points-a-game, and Dominik Szoboszlai, who was picked up by Smash & Grab last season in a trade with Gloopy Yarbles. This season he was drafted by S&G in the second round. Also watch out for Marcus Tavernier (24.5 FPts, also at Barons FC), Diego Gómez (23.5 FPts, also at Housewives and Beedle’s Boys), Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall (23.5 FPts, also at Housewives), and Michael Kayode (23.5 FPts, also at Housewives). Great minds.

Previous meetings:

As mentioned earlier, Hung LAB have faced Smash & Grab in the Champions League previously – winning both legs of their S.10 QF 32-30 & 41-39, but then losing in the Group Stage last year 61½-29. They met in Round 2 of the 2021 Spring Cup, Hung KO’d Smash with a 67-41 drubbing, and they’ve also exchanged blows in the Premier League over the last two seasons. Of those, Hung have won 3, Smash won 4 and they drew once.

Smash & Grab are also familiar with the Bigo1 of old, having faced them in several different competitions across seasons 4, 5 and 6.. This will be their seventeenth engagement; Smash have won 9 of the previous, Bigo1 have won 7. Similarly, they have also battled in the Premier League, Champions League and BFFA Cup. Interestingly, they have been involved in 2x league-and-cup double-headers in the past: in Season 4 Smash & Grab stole the PL & CL double-feature 46-44, and in Season 5 Bigo1 were victorious in the same match-up, edging it 56-53. Later that season S&G binned Bigo out of the Cup with a 74-45 win in the Second Round. The last time they met was in January 2020, shortly before the season was prematurely terminated. In that game Bigo1 ended S&G’s 5-game winning streak over them in a 63-51 thriller.

For the other four fixtures it will be the first time that the teams have been paired up for a match. In Gameweek 5 Preliminary Version will not only be facing Hung for the first time in their CL fixture, it will also be a Premier League showdown in our only First Round League-&-Cup double-header!

Group D

League Two champions and last season’s Best-ish winners Beedle’s Boys enter their first Champions League as one of the teams favoured to go far. They won the league in their debut season after drafting from fifth place, picking up Bruno Fernandes in the first round after Cole Palmer had gone to #2. This season, drafting from position four, Beedle’s picked up Palmer after Bruno went #2. It awaits to be seen whether Cold Palmer can emulate Bruno’s performance last season, but he is Beedle’s current top pointscorer (also of Group B’s Phenoms and WDB). He will be playing Hull City this weekend as the Boys face league rivals and fellow promoted-from-L2 side FPL Daddy.

After navigating their way to a League One title, Beyer Neverleusen (aka Bigger than Brolin, We Have Kompany, Drafty & Cullen the Herd) are one of the most decorated teams currently playing in the BFFA. They have won leagues, the Best-ish comp (2022), BFFA Cups, as well as minor trophies including the now defunct IML and pandemic-era Super Cup. But they have yet to get to a Champions League Final.

One of only two teams that enter the competition with a 3-0 league record, FPL Daddy are on a roll going into their maiden CL adventure. They were promoted to League One alongside Group D opponents Beedle’s Boys over the summer and joined the third tier with first pick in the Draft. As with every #1 pick this season, they’ve backed Erling Haaland to continue dominating the fantasy football landscape. This weekend FPL Daddy will be playing Toastenham Hankdog, second pick in the Draft, and on the grass #1 pick Haaland will be playing #2 pick Bruno Fernandes at Old Trafford. Meanwhile, the Daddies will simultaneously trying to get their CL debut off to a win against the Boys.

Founding members GoFYS FC have had a chequered history in their 12 years of BFFA. They have just the one title – Premier League Champions of 2016, but haven’t won any inter-league tournaments. However, in the four Champions Leagues that they have featured in, they have never been knocked out in the First Round! In their last venture in 2021 they were knocked out in the Quarters, 69-62 on agg., by eventual winners Mighty Fine Feeling.
As with FPL Daddy, GoFYS FC had the #1 pick in the Draft. Naturally, both picked Haaland, and both also signed Enzo Fernandes at the start of Round 4. Now teammates at the Etihad, they two will likely cancel each other out when they meet in Gameweeks 5 & 8.

Previous meetings:

Beyer Neverleusen and GoFYS FC have a shared history that goes back to Season 4 where they shared a group in the First Round. They took a win each, GoFYS went through to the Quarters, Beyer (as Bigger than Brolin) stopped there. Following that there have been league meetings in Seasons 8, 10, 11 and 12. Season 11 was dominated by GoFYS, winning all four times and taking their win streak over Beyer to seven. However, the last three match-ups were all Beyer’s on their way to the League One title. The last game was a 70-point slaughter (135½-62½) with what turned out to be the highest score of the season.

The only other pair to have played was of course the two teams promoted from League Two – Beedle’s Boys (champions) and FPL Daddy (3rd). Despite their final positions, it was FPL Daddy that had the better outcome of their matches. FPLD tainted the champions’ title party by beating them 64-57½ in GW36, the week the Boys were officially crowned champions. Daddy also won the previous two against Beedle 67½-40 and 60-47½.

Other Fixtures

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Early Season Form

We are three weeks into the season and our teams have had some time to finesse their fifteen man squads ready for the new Champions League tournament.

Team	Score	CL Group	Division	League Record	Topscorer
Smash & Grab	204½	Group C	Championship	W2 D0 L1	C. Gakpo
Housewives Favourite	202	Group A	Premier League	W2 D0 L1	B. Fernandes
Sporting Wicker Park	193	Group A	Championship	W1 D0 L2	R. Cherki
Wrockwardine WW	184½	Group A	League Two	W2 D0 L1	B. Fernandes
Hung Like a Bony	176	Group C	Premier League	W3 D0 L0	B. Saka
De Bruyne Trousers	172½	Group B	Premier League	W2 D0 L1	J. Gvardiol
Whiskey De Bruyne	171½	Group B	Championship	W2 D0 L1	C. Palmer
Barons	167	Group A	Premier League	W1 D1 L1	M. Ødegaard
Beyer Neverleusen	162	Group D	Premier League	W1 D0 L2	C. Gakpo
Gloopy Yarbles	161	Group B	Premier League	W1 D0 L2	King/Tarkowski
FPL Daddy	153	Group D	League One	W3 D0 L0	E. Haaland
Bigo1	148	Group C	League One	W1 D0 L2	B. Mbeumo
Beedle’s Boys	143	Group D	League One	W1 D0 L2	C. Palmer
The Phenoms	134½	Group B	Premier League	W0 D0 L3	C. Palmer
Preliminary Version	134½	Group C	Premier League	W1 D1 L1	A. Isak
GoFYS FC	134	Group D	Championship	W2 D0 L1	Haaland/Ajayi

Group A is looking extremely competitive pre-tourney; it features 3 of the top 4 highest-scoring CL teams.
Group B quite close together in the Bestish rankings.
Group C seems divided with Smash and the unbeaten Hung LAB scoring well; Prelim and Bigo – not so much.
And Group D has the lowest-scoring total of their four teams combined, but they’re very close together, and they include the 3-0 FPL Daddy.