As we move into the final round of the group stages, it is time to start thinking about planning our teams and squads for the knockout phase. If you’re playing the McFIFA game, there is an extra twist involved here; in addtition to deciding who represents the best value for the rest of tournament, we also have the added variable of player values to consider.

As confirmed earlier, we are now able to make unlimited transfers in the McFIFA game until 15:45 South Africa time (14:45 UK time) on 26th June. To the conscientious Fantasy Manager then, this represents an opportunity to gain a significant advantage over rivals by buying popular players that are rising in price, and then later selling them at a profit, thereby increasing the overall team value.

First of all, let’s explain how this is all possible. There are three main factors at work here…

• Player values rise at 00.00 South Africa time (23:00 UK time)
• Players can be sold for their current value, without paying a sell-on fee
• There’s currently no penalty for making transfers apart from the fact that number of transfers can decide rankings when teams are level

For this phase in the McFIFA game every Fantasy Manager has been given an extra 5.0 units in their budget and is now permitted to sign up to four players from each nation. The improved budget won’t go far however when you consider just how many of the cheap “value” players popular so far, will fail make it through to the knockout stages. It’s important to stress that this will mean that those strong budget options that do make it to the last sixteen (Uruguay, Mexico and South Korea players for starters) will doubtless become popular targets as squad filler. That is of course, in addition to the popular targets who have brought in strong returns thus far and look guaranteed for a place in the knockout phase – Messi, Maicon, Sneijder and Portugal’s bargain left-back Coentrao all enjoyed a price rise last night.

So when you’ve considered your targets – how do you go about making money? By applying a thought out trading strategy, it’s possible to increase you team value by over 1.5 units in just one night (as we saw in many cases last night). If this continues daily throughout the week, an additional budget boost of 3.0 to 4.0 looks achievable.

According to the McFIFA rules, three factors affect how a player’s value changes as they are transferred in or out:

• How many managers have the player in their team
• Is (or has) the player been injured or suspended
• How much the player’s value has already changed this round

This is pretty much in line with how it works in the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game, although in reality there must be a different algorithm applied as we have seen many players values increase by 0.3 to 0.4 units in one round, something which is virtually impossible in FPL. The McFIFA rules also confirm that price rises take place at the same time each day, and it is made clear that a player cannot rise by more than 0.1 units in a 24-hour period regardless of “Net Transfers In” (NTI) on that day.

“Player values will change at 00:00 South African Time, and any change will be 0.1 units. Player values will continue to change throughout the McDonald’s FIFA World Cup Fantasy, however players who have been eliminated will not change in value.”

Unlike FPL, you will not lose value by selling players whose price has already increased. This opens it up to much more wheeling and dealing, as you can sell that player on immediately after a price rise and pocket the full profit. It is therefore theoretically possible to increase your team value by up to 2.3m per day. As the McFIFA rules state…

“There is no sell-on fee or budget cap. Selling players at a greater price than you paid is a valid strategy for increasing your available budget.”

From some figures I pulled off the site last night, here are a few examples of how NTI has affected price rises so far.

If we look at a few examples, it appears as if Net Transfers In (NTI) of around 2000 to 4000 is equivalent to a rise of 0.1, although this figure will depend on how many people own that player already and whether they have already increased in value this round. Please take this with a pinch of salt however, these figures are for a week, whereas price rises occur daily and there are other factors at work here which we are yet to fully understand. So currently this figure is nothing more than a wild guess.

Unless someone comes up with a Crack The Code type tool, we are going to have to work on common sense to predict who will rise and fall. The stats page of the main site is useful in this respect, as it allows us to filter players by transfers in or out and see who the most popular players are at a glance.

If you do decide to take on this strategy of playing the market, then there are a few other factors you will need to consider. Once all games in a group are completed, the eliminated team’s players are no longer available to buy. If you intend on having a couple of 1.0 players in your team to free up cash despite them not playing, they will need to be brought in and kept before their final game or they will no longer be available to you. Once they’re in, they stay in, however.

If you plan on keeping some 1.0 players to sleep on your bench, keep an eye on the transfers out page, as these players will surely drop in value as people ship them out in preparation for the next round. It makes sense to wait until the last possible moment then to adopt this tactic in order to ensure you don’t lose money on these players.

It is also possible to filter the players on the statistics page by price rises this round, so it would make sense to rotate players around each day, as a player is unlikely to rise two days in a row. Look out for players who are high up on the ‘top transferred in’ page but have yet to have a price rise this round.

With just two price changes left before the transfer windows closes, we dont have a lot of time to take advantage of strategy. If we can get similar returns to those reported last night, however, then it is surely worth a crack. That’s if McFIFA don’t change the rules again of course.