Man, I swear, every single season starts the same way. You look at the fixture list, you feel all smart, you plan your first five or six weeks, and then boom—January hits, the FA Cup messes everything up, and suddenly you realize you missed the notification that three teams have two games in one week. Happened to me last year. I missed the huge haul from that Brighton DGW. I was furious. I swore I wouldn’t let it happen again.
My Journey to Hunting Down the 2024/25 Double Gameweeks
You can’t trust the FPL app for this stuff, right? They drop the bombshells right when you’re busy, usually during a miserable Tuesday afternoon at work. I decided this year I wasn’t waiting. I was going to beat the system and predict the chaos myself. This was a proper project. I pulled up the entire Premier League schedule the moment it dropped in June, and then I grabbed the full FA Cup and Carabao Cup calendars. I spent three full evenings cross-referencing this mess.
First thing I did was set up a giant spreadsheet. Don’t ask me what program—just the basic one everyone uses. I listed all 38 Gameweeks down the side. Then I put columns for ‘PL Fixture’, ‘Scheduled Cup Game’, and the crucial column: ‘Rescheduled Slot Potential’.
The key to predicting DGWs is understanding when games get moved. It’s almost always one of three reasons:
- Teams playing in the Carabao Cup Final (usually GW25 or so).
- Teams progressing deep in the FA Cup (Rounds 3, 4, 5, Quarterfinals often clash with PL games).
- Massive broadcast schedule shuffling or weird weather (less predictable, but it happens).
I started by marking every single FA Cup weekend. When a PL game is supposed to be played on an FA Cup Quarterfinal date (say, mid-March), and one or both of those teams are still in the Cup, that PL match has to move. That game becomes a ‘floating fixture’.
The Mess I Uncovered: Pinpointing the Bottlenecks
You quickly realize the PL doesn’t have endless space to stick these rescheduled games. They have to wedge them in between European nights and mid-week PL rounds. When a club is involved in Europe (especially if they make the knockout rounds), their mid-weeks are basically locked up. That leaves only a few viable slots for a Double Gameweek.
I literally spent hours counting the open mid-week slots for the heavy hitters—Liverpool, City, Arsenal. If they have three or four games that need moving, and they are deep in the Champions League, they are guaranteed a massive Double or maybe even a Triple Gameweek later on. That’s why you have to keep tabs on them.
I identified two major congestion points based purely on the domestic cups:
Bottleneck 1: The Carabao Cup Final Effect (Early DGW)
The Carabao Cup Final usually falls around late February or early March. Any Premier League game scheduled that weekend for the two finalists needs to be moved. I looked at the calendar and saw that the most likely place for that fixture to land is Gameweek 26 or sometimes Gameweek 29 if the teams have free mid-weeks then. This is the first, small DGW we usually see. You don’t get many teams here, maybe four max, but it’s important for planning transfers.
Bottleneck 2: The FA Cup Quarter/Semi-Final Fallout (The Big Bang)
This is where the magic happens. The FA Cup Quarters and Semis take up two crucial weekends, usually in March and April. Teams still playing in these rounds have their PL fixtures moved. This always creates the monster DGW.
My tracking showed that the bulk of these moved games—sometimes 8 to 10 fixtures total—will likely land in the period around Gameweek 34 or Gameweek 37. Why these two? Because the PL prefers to keep the run-in tidy, and by then, European fixtures are starting to wrap up, freeing up those crucial mid-week slots.
I went back through my data from the last three years just to confirm the pattern. They always dump the big mess right before the finish line.
The Final Prediction (My Practice Record)
Look, nothing is official until the PL announces it, often late in the season after the cup ties are settled. But if you want the jump on everyone else—and trust me, you do—you need to start planning for these weeks right now. I locked in these dates on my planning sheet as “High Probability Double Gameweeks.” This is what my notes show, based on the fixtures I project will be postponed:
- First Potential Double: GW 26 (Small, likely involves 2-4 teams affected by the League Cup final). Start thinking about those players now.
- Second Potential Double: GW 34 (Medium size, usually the first wave of FA Cup postponements that couldn’t fit earlier). This is a Bench Boost target.
- The Mega Double: GW 37 (The huge one, often 6-8 teams doubling. All the rescheduled European/FA Cup matches land here). This is where you want to use your Triple Captain or Free Hit chip. This is the big payoff for all the tracking work.
I’m not saying this is set in stone, but if you start building your team structure with Gameweek 37 in mind, focusing on teams that usually go deep in the FA Cup (the usual suspects), you will be miles ahead of the competition when the official announcements drop. I’m already looking at my draft team and asking: can this guy survive until GW37, and does he have a good chance of playing twice then? That’s the edge. I did the hard work of crunching the fixture numbers so you don’t have to panic later. Get planning, people.
