Guide · 5 min read

How bonus points work

Bonus points decide more close gameweeks than goals do, and they're the one part of the score that isn't settled when the match ends. Here's how they're awarded, why they move, and how to stop them ruining your Saturday evening.

What bonus points are

In every Premier League match, the game hands out bonus points to the players who performed best according to a separate scoring system called the Bonus Points System, or BPS. The top-ranked player in the match gets three bonus points, the second gets two, the third gets one, and each bonus point is worth one FPL point. In the two finished gameweeks of this season the game awarded bonus in exactly those three sizes and no others, so a player's bonus from a single match is always 0, 1, 2 or 3.

Ties on the BPS are shared rather than split. If two players tie for the top score, both receive three. Across this season's first twenty matches, twenty-two players received three bonus points, which can only happen if ties at the top occurred, and they did in more than one match.

How the BPS is built

The BPS is a running tally for every player in a match, built from the same events as the main score and many more besides. The game's data tracks, for every player, tackles, clearances, blocks and interceptions, recoveries and saves alongside goals, assists and clean sheets, and BPS draws on that level of detail. Positive actions add to a player's tally; negative ones, goals conceded, cards, own goals and missed penalties, take away. A goalkeeper who makes eight saves in a goalless draw, a defender who scores and keeps a clean sheet, a midfielder with a goal and an assist: these are the shapes of a high BPS.

You don't need the exact weights to use the system. What matters is that BPS is far more granular than FPL points, so two players on the same FPL score can be far apart on BPS, and a player who did nothing visible can quietly lead a match on defensive actions alone.

Provisional bonus, and why it moves

While a match is in progress, the BPS is being tallied live, so anyone with the data can rank the players and say who would get the bonus if the match ended now. That's provisional bonus, and it's what live tables, including this site's live gameweek view, show. It's labelled an estimate because it is one.

It moves for two reasons. First, the match isn't over: a late goal conceded takes BPS off every defender and the goalkeeper; a stoppage-time assist adds a chunk to a midfielder; a yellow card in the 89th minute knocks someone off the podium. Second, the stats themselves get reviewed after the whistle. An assist can be reassigned or removed, a goal can be credited differently, a defensive action can be recategorised. The game applies bonus only once a match's stats are finalised, and marks the whole gameweek as checked later still; the data carries a flag for exactly that.

The practical effect is that bonus can change hours after full time, and occasionally the next day. Until the game confirms it, treat it as a forecast.

A worked example of a swing

Two players in the same match sit on 30 and 29 BPS at the 85th minute. The first is provisionally on three bonus, the second on two. In stoppage time the first player's side concedes. He's a defender, so he loses BPS for the goal conceded and drops to 26; the second player is a midfielder and is unaffected. The bonus flips: two for the defender, three for the midfielder. Each player has moved one point, but if you own the defender and your rival owns the midfielder, the gap between you has moved by two. If one of them is a captain, by four. In a gameweek where the whole mini-league is separated by six points, a stoppage-time goal at the other end of the country has just re-ordered the table.

Defensive contribution: the same idea, a different threshold

Alongside bonus sits the defensive-contribution point. A player who reaches a set number of defensive actions in a match earns 2 points on top of anything else he scores; the game's scoring settings list it at 2 for defenders, midfielders and forwards and 0 for goalkeepers. In the finished gameweeks so far, defenders have collected it from 10 defensive actions and midfielders from 12, and never from fewer. Like bonus, it turns invisible work into points, and like bonus it can arrive or vanish late in a match as the last few clearances are counted and reviewed.

The rest of the scoring, for context

Bonus sits on top of a scoring system that's fixed and published. A goal is worth 10 to a goalkeeper, 6 to a defender, 5 to a midfielder and 4 to a forward. An assist is 3. A clean sheet is 4 for goalkeepers and defenders and 1 for midfielders, and in the finished gameweeks so far every clean sheet awarded went to a player who was on the pitch for at least an hour. Appearance points are 2 for an hour or more and 1 for less. Goalkeepers and defenders lose a point for every two goals conceded, and goalkeepers gain a point for every three saves. A penalty save is 5, a missed penalty −2, a yellow card −1, a red card −3, an own goal −2. Every one of those figures comes from the game's own settings or from the points it actually awarded this season.

How to live with it

Three habits. Don't celebrate or despair over a provisional three; wait for the confirmation. When you're comparing yourself with a rival mid-gameweek, look at the gap without bonus first, then ask how many of the provisional bonus points sit on players only one of you owns, because that's the part that can still swing. And when the final numbers land, check the gameweek page for that week: every finished gameweek is there in numbers once the game has confirmed it, so you're reading the settled version rather than the live guess.

The Rivalry Report runs on the same settled data once a gameweek is finished, and on labelled estimates while it's live. Compare two managers mid-gameweek and you'll see which figures are still moving.