With Euro 2012 tournament now edging ever closer, it’s time we reacquainted ourselves with the Fantasy League Pro game, to offer those of you who have signed up a summary of the next steps involved.

Starting Your Auctions

League Chairman need to select when to start their league auctions carefully – start too early and you could miss out on players or leave managers stuck with injured players.

Your auction should not be started until the Fantasy League player lists has been fixed. This is done once all the squads have been finalised – the deadline was 11am this morning (Tuesday May 29).

When the auction begins, the player list is frozen at that point and new players added to the country squads won’t be available until the end of the group stages – any auctions that have already started, then, could be missing late squad additions.

In addition, once the auction starts, players signed in round one of the auction are locked in our squads – they cannot be transferred out until after the full auction is complete and the transfer windows open.

With all this in mind, we advise Chairman to begin their auctions from today (Tuesday May 29) onwards, with Sunday June 3 perhaps a good deadline for the round one bids. Further rounds can then follow every 24-hours until the squads are complete.

The official Scout Leagues (all three divisions) will begin their auctions tomorrow, Wednesday May 31, with the round one deadline likely to be Sunday June 3.

This will allow plenty of time for three to four rounds of auction bids before the tournament starts. Bear in mind that friendly matches run until June 5, with the risk of injury and squad withdrawal therefore still a factor. Running a final round of bids after that date is advised.

Informing Your Managers

You can, of course, use the Division Chairman’s Office to alert your managers to your proposed auction date.

To start the auction phase, Chairman should click on Enter Auction for their division in the lobby and then set a deadline for the first round of bids. All managers in the league will receive email notification that the auction has commenced with details of the deadline for their first round of bids.

Setting League Rules

When the Chairman enters the auction phase, they can then configure the full league rules. This must be completed before the auction can begin.

Leagues are set up with the following default rules which can all be tweaked:

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.

You can find full details of these settings, along with a guide to what can be customised right here.

One popular tweak to the above would be to open up the possibility of four players from each country once we enter the knockout phase.

You can always use your lobby comments board to discuss would-be rule changes with members of your division before finalising the rules. Bear in mind, the rules can only be changed prior to round one of your auction.

Yet to Sign Up?

There’s still plenty of time to create a league of your own and start recruiting managers.

Feel free to recruit to your leagues via this thread or drop us a line at euro@fantasyfootballscout.co.uk to give us details of your league, we’ll then cover it in our build-up articles.