Chelsea's FPL Warning Went to Staff — but the João Pedro Tip That Went Viral Came From Morgan Rogers' Brother's Team

Chelsea have emailed their staff about Fantasy Premier League. The reminder, first reported by BBC Sport on Monday, warns employees about the consequences of using inside information on public gaming platforms, where a benched or transferred-out player can tell the world who won't be available. It follows the afternoon in late October when João Pedro's quad injury was all over social media hours before Chelsea's team sheet confirmed he was missing from the 2-0 home loss to Tottenham. But the email goes to the people who are easiest to reach. The account that turned the rumor into a viral post, according to the fantasy manager who found it, belonged to Morgan Rogers' brother.

The clues came from the game's own public data. Fantasy Premier League has more than 11 million players, its leaderboard is open, and tools let anyone search those teams and the people who run them. On the day of the Spurs game, The Independent reported, one account flagged that "massive assets" were missing from multiple games, and an analyst known as FPL Joe posted a diagram of fantasy teams run by people linked to Chelsea's dressing room. One of them appeared to have benched João Pedro, an odd move with one of the season's top-scoring fantasy forwards.

The manager known online as FPL Karim told BBC Sport he went first to Rogers' own team and found nothing new there. "He'd sold Joao Pedro two or three gameweeks earlier when he was injured. He never bought him back," he said. "Then I checked his brother's FPL team and saw that he'd sold Joao Pedro that gameweek and brought in Nicolas Jackson. I thought it was a bit weird. Why would you sell him when he's one of the most-owned forwards in the game?"

He posted it, and it spread. BBC Sport's Monday report says trackers claimed Rogers and several staff members had also removed the Brazilian before kickoff. Chelsea have not confirmed whose accounts those are, and the Independent said the club declined to comment at the time. The official team news arrived at 4:15 p.m. U.K. time, after the fantasy deadline had passed. By then, according to BBC Sport, 1.7 million managers had made João Pedro their captain, the pick that doubles a player's points.

Chelsea regard the episode as an isolated case and don't plan any further restrictions, BBC Sport reported, preferring to rely on greater awareness among players and staff. That's a reasonable answer for employees. A club can discipline its own staff, and it can tell players not to pick teammates. It has no such hold over a player's brother, cousin or friends, and in this case the most telling account was a relative's, not Rogers' own.

The league doesn't fill that gap either. FPL's terms and conditions say employees of the Premier League and their immediate families may play but can't win prizes. They say nothing about club players, club staff or their relatives. The Premier League has strict rules against gambling but offers clubs no specific guidance on fantasy football and treats it as a club matter. Some clubs set their own lines: BBC Sport has reported that Fulham staff are advised not to pick Fulham players.

Xabi Alonso didn't know about any of it when he was asked after the Spurs defeat. "I am not into the fantasy team thing, so I didn't know that," he said. He later explained that João Pedro had missed the match because of "fluid on his thigh." The striker had been pictured in training that week and hasn't played for Chelsea since a win over Everton last month.

This is the latest in a long run of problems at Stamford Bridge. Team selections leaked before both legs of last season's Champions League defeat by Paris Saint-Germain under Liam Rosenior, and it later emerged that Marc Cucurella's barber had revealed online that João Pedro and Cole Palmer would miss a trip to Brighton. Chelsea have since built new fencing around their first-team training pitches and reminded players to be careful about who they talk to. Alonso, for his part, has become one of the league's most guarded managers about injuries. "I prefer not to give more information than needed," he said in September before a 3-0 loss at Brentford.

The Premier League has been here before. In February 2021, fantasy sleuths spotted that Jack Grealish would miss Aston Villa's game against Leicester, and Brendan Rodgers later said he had heard the rumors before kickoff. Dean Smith reportedly banned people inside Villa from playing the game afterward, and Pep Guardiola later called the practice "unethical and unprofessional." The trackers have adapted too. "I have noticed some players have started using aliases," FPL Focal, who specializes in finding club-linked accounts, told BBC Sport.

The fix Chelsea chose costs nothing and inconveniences no one, which is why it may not hold. Fencing can keep photographers away from training, and an email can remind staff what they signed. Neither reaches a phone in a relative's pocket on a Friday night before the fantasy deadline. Until the league writes something down or a club takes what the BBC called the nuclear option of banning the game outright, the open leaderboard will keep doing what it did with João Pedro: telling 11 million people the team news before the manager does.