Fantasy League’s Free Pro Version of the Euro 2012 game is now live. This is a great opportunity to try out a fully fledged auction game, with Fantasy managers plotting and battling for players over an offline or online auction, and then bidding for new players as the tournament progresses.
How Do I get involved?
Join a Scout League
Join our Scout Leagues as a manager. Myself and Sir Paulos have already formed leagues and we will look to form further leagues when full. We’ll keep you posted in future articles on this.
*Edit* We’ve now filled three Scout Leagues up and invites to those involved will be emailed very shortly. We will keep you posted on any new Scout Leagues that open up but, any community member wishing to open an FFS league can find details below.
Form your own league
The other option is to set up a league as a Chairman. This enables you to set your own auction date and custom rules. The Fantasy League are recommending that leagues include around eight players. You can, of course, use our comment boards to help set up leagues. Even better, if you set up a league and want us to cover it, then email me at mark@fantasyfootballscout.co.uk and we’ll help advertise your league if you’re still looking for new players. Community leagues should be set up with “FFS” proceeding their league name.
Chairmen are fully responsible for the leagues they set up: Fantasy Football Scout won’t be getting involved in ensuring that these run smoothly, so if you set up a league, ensure you’re committed to running it before recruiting managers.
Tell us more…
The Fantasy League has a pretty extensive Game Guide published here.
Here’s some key points you’ll want to know…
The Auction
In Fantasy League Pro, any one player can only play for one team. The auction date is set by the chairman of the league and can either be done face-to-face in your favoured boozer, or the game will run an online auction for your league, processing the bids and allocating the players.
The chairman can set up the league and assign teams and local rules in the League Lobby, before entering the auction and setting a deadline for all teams to input their first set of bids.
Each manager in the league will put in their secret bids using the Online Auction Engine, entering the maximum price they are willing to bid for each player.
Once the deadline passes, the chairman hits ‘Process Bids’ and the system reveals each manager’s bids, assigning each player to the team of highest bidding manager.
The league chairman will then set the bid deadline for Round Two of the auction, and the process continues in bidding rounds until all squads are complete.
Once the Chairman has set up the Auction Rules and the first bid deadline, managers can start bidding for players. Managers enter their players with bids alongside them via their own secure bidding page. Before being accepted, bids are checked to make sure they follow the rules of the game and the auction league rules (formations, country quotas etc) set by the chairman.
The Auction Status page includes Budget details, Free Agents list and a Bulletin board for up to date online banter. Basically it allows all league members to see how much money managers have left and whether they are yet to submit their bids for that round.
Scoring
Just like any Fantasy game, your players will score points based on their real-life performances in each match, with the classic Fantasy League scoring system that awards points for goals, assists and clean sheets in place. Double points are scored during the Knock Out stage, making players from nations that progress all the more precious.
Custom Rules
For those that want to make a quick start, there are some default league rules when you set up your auction to allow you to just get things moving. However, there are also an array of custom settings that the Chairman can tinker with. These included: setting your own team budgets and transfer window rules, select which formations will be available to managers, choose how many players each manager can select from any one real-life nation, a quota which you could increase as the tournament progresses and teams get knocked out.
Default Settings for Leagues are as follows:
- Squad Size:15 players per team.
- Country Quota:Two players maximum from any real-life country.
- Auction Budget:£100 million.
- Tournament Budget:£25 million, plus any budget left over from the auction.
- Bid Increments:£0.5 million increments for all bids.
- Transfers: Maximum of 20 transfers in the tournament; maximum of 10 transfers in Group Stage; maximum of 10 transfers in Knockout Stage.
- Formations: All three formations (4-4-2, 4-3-3, 5-3-2) available.
