Want to win Fantasy Premier League 20/21?
Choose a team with numbers, not with heart.
It’s that time of year again. You’ll start getting request from your mates to join a Fantasy Football league that they’re starting.
Just £20 and the winner takes all, Dave said.
Last year there were 15 people in the league, that’s £300 for doing something you enjoy. Not bad, you think. Plus, there’s the glory.
Shame you came 7th last year though.
Dave seemed to rake the points in every week and your favourite players never seemed to do that well.
Your initial selections need to be spot on this year and the deadline is fast approaching (Sat 12 Sep 14:30 GMT).
So how do you choose?
Here are a few rules to guide you well this season:
PRE-SEASON
Take your heart out of it.
Don’t choose players from the team you support. You care about them. They make you irrational. You’ll choose them ahead of someone more qualified but from a team that riles you up.
If you absolutely must, keep it to just one player.
In all the chaos, go with what you know.
First, use numbers.
Throw together a little spreadsheet even so you can make more informed purchases. This way you can see how many points you get for your millions (take a look at my example below). Past performance is one of the best predictors of future performance.
Second, avoid new players (either transfers in or players from promoted teams).
You don’t know how well they play in the Premier League. Sure, they might have done well in La Liga last year, but what are the chances they will adapt to their new team from day one?
If they start playing well later, you can always bring them in. If they don’t hit the ground running, they lose value and you lose crucial budget.
If you absolutely have to, if you can’t help yourself, keep it to one or two new players. No more.
Simple example spreadsheet.
Here we have player name, their cost this season, the points from last season, and the points per million this year assuming they score the same number of points as last year.
In the above, players have been ranked by the number of points they each got per million they cost. You can see that it’s not always the players who score the most points who are the best value.
Look at Aubamayeng and Sterling: 205 and 204 points respectively, but £11.5 and £12 million. Is it worth it? (17.7 and 17.1 points per million). Salah got 19.4 points per million. Mahrez got 20.6 points per million. De Bruyne got 21.8 points per million.
You can also see that some of the cheaper players, bring in a decent amount of points for how much they cost. You need a few cheap players to make budget available for the big names, choose these players wisely.
Look at Lundstrum in the third table. He wasn’t anywhere near the top of the table for points, but he was way ahead in terms of value. 26.2 points per million.
Tools like this are not definitive, but you should use them to guide your thinking.
IN-SEASON
Watch the markets
Money is crucial in this game. Other than your brain, it’s all you have.
If a player falls out of favour with the masses and you have them in your team, drop them and drop them quick before they lose too much value. This can happen due to a serious injury or consistently poor performance.
You can do this by regularly keeping an eye on the transfers in/out this week on the stats page.
Adjust small and think long term
Don’t make too many extra transfers. I can’t stress this enough.
Those -4s add up quickly and you lose track. How many times have you made two extra transfers chasing the perfect week only to see one of them get taken off before the 60th minute and the other get a red card?
Just one extra transfer a week adds up to a whopping 152 points.
Plan your transfers and keep them minimal. Never undertake a big change up just for a single perfect week to the detriment of later weeks. The season is long, so play a long game.
If you do make a change, make sure that player has a good few game weeks ahead. Don’t bring a player in for a home game against struggling Fulham in the hope of a big haul this week when your team faces Arsenal, Chelsea, and Liverpool the weeks after.
Look and think ahead.
