As we announced last week, FantasyiTeam (FiT) have released one of the first available Fantasy Football games geared towards the Brazil 2014 World Cup:

A free Fantasy football app, FiT is available on a number of mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, iPodTouch and Android. It’s free to download and play, so you can already go in and start drafting up your starting XI with unlimited transfers.

We’ll be supporting FiT throughout the summer and have an official Fantasy Football Scout League, with a £500 Amazon voucher available to the winner. There’s also the small matter of a £5k holiday available as the prize to the overall FiT World Cup winner.

In this, our second article on the game, we take a closer look at the nuts and bolts involved in the scoring system and principles involved when making transfers, monitoring price changes and maximising your squad for each Gameweek.

Team Selection

FiT hands us managers an initial budget of £75m to select our starting XI. In terms of formation, there are seven systems (4-4-2, 4-3-3, 4-5-1, 5-4-1, 5-3-2, 3-5-2 or 3-4-3) available to choose from – similarly to the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game, you must have at least three defenders and no more than a trio of forwards in your lineup.

For the initial group stages, you can only pick a maximum of three players from any side. This quota increases as the tournament progresses, though – rising to four in the first knockout round, five in the quarter-finals and six in both the semi-finals and final.

Scoring Points

The scoring system is relatively straightforward. Any player who starts a game is awarded two points, though an appearance off the bench earns a single point.

Keepers and defenders both benefit from clean sheets. Providing they play 60+ minutes and the team doesn’t concede, they earn five points, though a single point is lost for every goal against. If a game goes to extra-time, a team will only register a clean sheet if they fail to concede over the entire 120 minutes.

In terms of goals scored, keepers and defenders are awarded seven points for finding the net, whilst midfielders pick up six points and forwards five. An assist is worth three points, regardless of position.*

Disciplinary-wise, a red card deducts five points from a player’s score, though yellows do not have any detrimental effect. Spot-kicks are also crucial – keepers earn five points for saving a penalty, whilst a missed attempt deducts three points from the taker’s total. This does not apply to penalty shoot-outs, however.

As in the FPL game, Captains earn us double points. A skipper can be set anytime, as long as it is 10 mins before kick-off. You are however, only allowed one captain per Gameweek, but if the first captain you select doesn’t play AND is not on the bench, then you can choose another armband option in that Gameweek.

When the games kick off, it’s worth mentioning that you can also follow the action via the Matchday Centre, with goals and assists updated as they happen.

*To elaborate on the official assist rules:

“Assists are awarded to the player who makes the last touch before the goal is scored and he must be from the goal scoring team. If after this last touch by a player of the goal scoring team, a player from the opposing team touches the ball inside the penalty area, altering the intended direction of the ball, the assist is still given. If a penalty is given, the player earning the penalty will receive an assist if a goal is directly scored, but not if he takes the penalty himself. This rule DOES NOW apply to players winning free-kicks. All assists are carefully reviewed, but remain provisional until verification is obtained. To avoid doubt, points awarded are subject to change until the Gameweek ends, at which point no further adjustments will be made.”

Transfers

The FiT World Cup game consists of seven Gameweeks – three for the group stages and the remaining four for each of the knockout rounds.

We’re handed three free transfers per Gameweek to restructure our side, essentially giving us 14 players per round (more on that in a bit), though there is also the option to purchase a fourth, “Additional Transfer” per round, it costs 100 FiT Credits to do so.

Transfers do not roll over each Gameweek – essentially, you use ‘em or lose ‘em. Once the group stages are over, we’re handed unlimited transfers to restructure our sides before the first game of the knockout stages gets underway.

As indicated, there’s a twist to the FiT transfer strategy, outlined brilliantly in a recent comment post by veteran player, Rbcantona7:

• The order of fixtures matters, if you have a player starting in one game, once that game has started you can transfer out that player for a player starting in a later game and still receive points for both. This effectively means that if you have three transfers to use in a game round you can be gaining points from up to 14 players.
• You can also rotate expensive players. Rather than having three big hitters in your team at the start of a Gameweek taking up a huge chunk of your budget, if you plan it right you’ll have the one playing first in your team at the start of your gameweek. Once they’ve played, you can then swap them out for the one playing next and so on. This means you can have three big hitters playing without it having too much of an effect on the rest of your team.

The FiT rules give an example scenario where this strategy could come into play:

“You could have David Silva in your iTeam for the 8pm game against the Netherlands on Friday 13th June, you can then transfer him out while Spain are playing, say 9pm, and still receive his points for the rest of the game. You could bring in Alexis Sanchez in his place and then score points for him as well in the Chile v Australia fixture at 11pm on the same day.”

Finally, it’s crucial that your trades must be made at least 10 minutes before a game gets underway in order for the transfer to go through. Basically, this rule is advantageous to the more active Fantasy manager, affording us the chance to monitor teamsheets and fine-tune our tinkering prior to kick-off.

Player Prices

Keeping an eye on the transfer market is advised. The iTeam game uses a PlayerDAQ index which changes every six hours in accordance with player popularity – like FPL, it’ll pay to keep abreast of the bandwagons and watch out for price drops in order to maximise our team budgets. Unlike FPL, for example, if you purchase a player for 10.0 and he rises to 10.2, your selling price is 10.2 as opposed to 10.1.

Fantasy Football Scout League

We’ve already set up an official Fantasy Football Scout league for you to join – the league name is Fantasy Football Scout and the pin is 4915.