Confirmed lineups are published 75 minutes before kick-off in the Premier League and in UEFA competitions, and 60 minutes before kick-off across the EFL. Both numbers come from a rulebook rather than from custom, and the gap between "the XI is decided" and "you can see the XI" is where most matchday confusion lives.
When confirmed lineups actually drop
Seventy-five minutes is the submission deadline almost everywhere in the English professional game. What changes is how long clubs then sit on it.
Premier League Handbook Rule L.23 requires each club to submit a team sheet "at least 75 minutes before the time fixed for the kick-off of a League Match", carrying shirt numbers and names including substitutes, strip colours and up to seven officials for the trainers' bench. Rule K.95 does the bit fans feel: "A Club playing in a League Match shall not publish the teams until 75 minutes before kick-off." Submission and publication now sit on one clock, which is the change that arrived in 2024/25. Miss the L.23 deadline and Rule L.25 charges £2,500, rising to £5,000 for a second breach in a season and £10,000 for a third.
The EFL kept the older arrangement, and it is published rather than folklore. Regulation 34.5 of the EFL Handbook wants the team sheet in the referee's dressing room at least 75 minutes before advertised kick-off, then adds: "Neither Club shall publish the teams or otherwise provide details of the teams to any third party (other than League appointed broadcast partners) until 60 (sixty) minutes before the advertised time of kick-off." The hour you're used to in the Championship, League One and League Two is an embargo with a fixed end time, and broadcast partners get it a quarter of an hour before you do.
UEFA works to the same deadline with a harder lock. Champions League match sheets are exchanged no earlier than 75 minutes out, and once exchanged the XI is fixed.
Cup football splits by round. The Carabao Cup mirrors the league at 75 and 60 under Rule 7.1. FA Cup Rule 114 sets 75 minutes for submission and a 60-minute embargo in the Competition Proper, then drops submission to 45 minutes in the Qualifying Competition. At a qualifying tie, the team news genuinely does not exist an hour before kick-off.
Why predicted lineups get it wrong so often
A predicted XI is a reconstruction of last week's team plus whatever the manager said on Friday, and it cannot see the two things that decide selection: the medical report from that morning, and the fixture three days later.
There's a number on this. TheFantasyTool scored 1,907 predicted lineups and 20,996 individual player calls between 11 June and 14 September 2026, and found 85.2% of predicted starters actually started, with the best Premier League sources above 93%. Their own caveat is the useful half: an 85% per-player hit rate does not give you an 85% chance of a correct XI, because eleven calls compound, and the players any source gets wrong tend to be the rotation decisions every source gets wrong.
Bench size varies by competition too. Premier League Rule L.29 allows nine substitutes of whom five may play. EFL Regulation 34.4.1 gives Championship clubs nine and League One and League Two clubs seven, five used in both. Carabao Cup Rule 8.1 gives everyone nine, so a League Two side naming seven on the Saturday can name nine in the cup on the Tuesday.
ONTOUR's data for Fulham against Manchester United at Craven Cottage on 20 September, which finished 1-1 with Peter Bankes refereeing, shows both sides in a 4-2-3-1 under Álvaro Arbeloa and Carrick with nine substitutes each. The XI is the opening position. The hour after it is a separate set of decisions, and no prediction covers it.
Late withdrawals, and the one change the rules allow
Once the team sheets are in, every competition allows exactly one kind of change, and the bar for it differs.
The Premier League sets the highest. Rule L.26 lets a club add another name where a player is "injured or otherwise incapacitated after the submission of the team sheet but before kick-off", and only "upon his Team Doctor or, if they are unavailable, another doctor certifying that the injury or incapacitation is such that the Player in question cannot reasonably be expected to play". Rule L.27 sends the amendment straight to the referee, the opposing club and the match manager.
UEFA is blunter. Article 56 states that "after the match sheets have been exchanged, no changes are allowed", excepting a starting-eleven player who cannot start "due to physical incapacity" and is replaced by a substitute already listed. Do it without medical evidence and it counts against your in-game substitutions.
The EFL is the most forgiving. Regulation 34.7 handles injury the same way, then adds a clause the others lack: where "any other extenuating circumstances" require a replacement, "the Referee shall allow such replacement" and reports the circumstances to the league. FA Cup Rule 115 sits between the two.
So when a name sits in the graphic at T-75 and has gone by the whistle, one of those clauses is why. The warm-up is the tell. A player who jogs out, does a few strides, has a word with the physio and walks back down the tunnel is the one to watch, and you'll have seen it on the pitch ten minutes before it reaches the feed.
Where the lineup feed thins out
The data behind every lineup graphic fills only once an XI is confirmed, and its coverage stops well before the bottom of the pyramid.
Both halves show up in ONTOUR's fixture data. The Farnborough v Uxbridge FA Cup tie on 22 September returns an empty lineups field before the teams are in, which is what Rule 114's 45-minute qualifying deadline would predict. Norwich City v Bolton Wanderers at Carrow Road comes back with both XIs. Scunthorpe United v Boreham Wood at the Attis Arena, a National League game on 16 September, has no lineups recorded at all.
That's true of every app drawing on this class of feed. Follow a non-league club and the club's own social account beats any aggregator. From the Championship upwards, it's dependable.
A countdown worth working to
Work backwards from kick-off instead of refreshing at random.
- T-90: confirm the game is on, at the time you think. Postponements surface here.
- T-75: Premier League and UEFA XIs go public. EFL and cup team sheets reach the referee, embargoed.
- T-60: the EFL and cup embargoes lift. Championship, League One and League Two team news lands.
- T-45: FA Cup qualifying sheets are submitted. Everywhere else, the warm-up. Look for anyone in a bib doing very little.
- T-15: the teamsheet goes up in the ground and the tannoy reads it. Inside the stadium this beats your phone.
- Kick-off: the handshake line settles it.
If you're travelling, set one alert for T-75. Very little that arrives three hours out survives contact with the team sheet.
What a lineup panel can't tell you
A search panel gives you eleven names, and it has nothing to say about who from your end is going.
That part we track. Every fixture on ONTOUR carries a count of fans marked as going, with the predictions logged against it alongside, which is the one question a lineup panel has no answer to. It matters most on the games people travel for, the away day you're deciding whether to book or the ground you've still not ticked off. Eleven names tell you what the match will look like. The count tells you whether the away end is filling with people you know.
The rest sits alongside it: fixtures for what's on, live scores while it's running, a stadium list for the grounds you're ticking off. ONTOUR is a football app, named for being on tour following your club, and unrelated to the logistics and clothing firms that share the name.
One ask. If you're at a game this week, mark yourself as going before kick-off rather than after. That's what puts it in front of the next person deciding whether to make the trip.
Rules quoted from the Premier League Handbook Season 2026/27 (K.95, L.23, L.25, L.26, L.27, L.29), the EFL Handbook 2024/25 and its Carabao Cup Rules (34.4.1, 34.5, 34.7, 7.1, 8.1), the Rules of the FA Challenge Cup Season 2024-25 (114, 115, 117, 118) and the UEFA Champions League regulations (Article 56), using the latest editions published on efl.com and thefa.com. Accuracy figures are TheFantasyTool's own scoring. Fixture and lineup data from ONTOUR's public fixtures API, 22 September 2026. Written with AI assistance and edited by a human.
