The Original Fantasy League is back for the 2019/20 season and Fantasy Football Scout has plenty of content to help managers play the game.
For those looking to master Fantasy League, we’re lucky enough to have an in-house expert – FFS site user Clouseau – to help us out.
Last week we alerted you to the relaunch of Fantasy League for the 2019/20 season, with a Q&A with founder Andrew Wainstein and an introduction to the long-running auction-based game.
This latest feature is the second of a two-part piece which looks in more detail at how to have an effective auction – from prepping in advance through to the big night itself.
Having already looked at how to prep for the auction, this article will delve into how to manage the event itself, from general strategies to specific tactics.
The Auction
So the big night has arrived. Everything you’ve been working towards for days/weeks/months is about to come to a head. You will determine, over the next two or three hours, how the next nine months are going to pan out and whether your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/cat/dog should give you a wide berth most weekends.
You’ll be nervous, you’ll be excited, you’ll be wishing you had another five minutes to peruse the player list but, hopefully, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars that you’re well-prepped as you look around at other bewildered managers, some of whom are viewing the player list for the first time.
Take a few deep breaths and remember that this is supposed to be fun. Supposed to be. By all means have a drink to settle the nerves but pace yourself with the beers as you need to be capable of writing on your team-sheet as the auction draws to a close.
Auction Strategies
There are three main strategies you can adopt: ‘go for broke’, aiming for a balanced squad, or a mix of the two.
By ‘go for broke’, I mean identifying a few players for whom you are going to go all-in, and getting them even if it means wiping out your budget. This strategy rarely results in mid-table obscurity and will either see you win the league at a canter or crash and burn with a whimper if your big players fail to live up to your expectations.
Having a balanced squad is for the more cautious manager who wants to ensure good value for money (VFM) and to avoid overpaying for any player.
Mixing the two means not being afraid to go for the odd big-hitter but not putting all your eggs in one basket. Those of you who play FPL will probably be drawn naturally to this strategy given that most FPL squads feature this mix of premium, middling and budget players.
I’ll say now that there’s no one correct strategy and obviously only player choice and hindsight will confirm the best approach. I have adopted all three and won with all three, although I would say that my preference is generally to try for a mixed squad.
My one relegation occurred when I lost my bottle on all the big-hitters and tried to compensate by getting the second best striker/midfielder behind the star players at their respective clubs, all of whom proved to be terrible VFM. I won’t ever make that mistake again and I suggest that you avoid it too.
“Show Me The Money”
Irrespective of the strategy you adopt, there’s a fundamental principle which cuts across everything: you want as much of your fellow managers’ money spent as early as possible.
When it’s your turn to nominate a player, make sure you use it well. This can mean bringing up a player you are hoping to pick up for free, or at a very specific price point, or making someone else spend a tonne of their cash.
Let’s suppose you’ve decided that you won’t battle to get Aguero as you think he’ll prove too expensive. If that’s the case then toss him out there early doors to get others fighting over him.
That’s going to be a big chunk of someone’s budget gone in one fell swoop and whilst it’s probably money well spent for that manager, it’s less money in the general pot to deny you the players that you want.
What you will inevitably find, as is usual with human psychology when people are flush with cash, is that a lot of money gets spent in the early rounds of the auction. If you can stay out of that as much as possible, you will find that you will emerge once the dust has settled with more money than most, which can put you in the driving seat for the later rounds.
That said, this approach requires you to keep a close track of the players which have gone because you don’t want to suddenly find that all the big-hitters have gone and you are looking at a big budget to spend on mediocrity.
Pick Your Price
Remember, when it’s your turn to bid, you can state any price for a player up to the maximum amount you have remaining. There are two ways this can work in your favour.
Given that you can’t bid against yourself, any time a manager outbids you, your next bid will be at least two units above your original bid. If perhaps you think that a free bid would get outbid, but for you to then bid above that would take it outside the price you’d like to pay, make your starting bid the mid-point (1 unit) rather than zero.
This can be particularly effective for marginal players who are ‘punty’ but too good to let someone get for free.
The other tactic you can employ, generally for premium players, is to jump straight in with the top price you’re prepared to pay (or a little lower if you’re feeling brave). This can have the effect of shocking the other managers sufficiently that they don’t outbid you, and works well if you suspect that your top price may be lower than another manager’s top price for that player.
This tactic doesn’t only have to apply when it’s your turn to nominate a player; you can do it just as effectively if someone else has started the bidding. With premium players, you will at very least earn the respect and thanks of your fellow managers because if that player is going to go for £20m, it’s utterly tedious having someone start at zero, then someone else bids £1m, another person £2m etc etc. Cutting right to the chase shows that you are a force to be reckoned with: a fearless competitor who understands player values and probably needs the auction to be over as quickly as possible so that you can get back to saving the world from disaster. Or get to the bar because you’ve just taken the last swig of your beer…..
Saving For a Rainy Day….
The person with the most money in the latter stages of the auction can control how it plays out. In a scenario with eight managers where everyone else is spent up but you have 10% of your money left, you will be able to outbid anyone 10 times, plus every one of your own nominations can be written straight onto your team-sheet given that no one will be able to bid you up.
This can be a great tactic and can be achieved with any strategy (although with ‘go for broke’ you’ll have to hold back the last of your pot), but is particularly good if you are more concerned with VFM than specific players AND you are closely monitoring the player list and are aware that there are still a lot of good players left.
The latter part of this equation is essential because, needless to say, there’s little point in outbidding people to get the players who were just going to make up the numbers in their squads. This is where lists will serve you well.
Not only come armed with them but make sure you cross off names as they go so that you know precisely who is left. Managers who don’t have lists will a) pick up players they didn’t want (because they’ll end up scouring the player list, not be able to see the wood for the trees, and plump for the first name they recognise), and b) annoy the hell out of everyone else for taking so long.
Follow the Money
I would always advise, again irrespective of the strategy you adopt, to keep track of the other managers’ money and, if you’re particularly keen, the clubs from which their players hail. Knowing how you sit relative to others is critical in determining the players you raise and size of your bids.
Let me give you an example: you’re at the point of the auction when most of the money has been spent and you know that you have the second largest pot remaining but there’s one big name left on the player list. You need to find a way to get the manager with the most money to spend some of theirs in order to bring it below yours.
To do this, you may have to sacrifice a mid-range player by nominating them when it’s your turn and hoping the manager with the most money takes the bait of refusing to allow you to get that player at a below par price. And there you were thinking that all you had to do was show up, make a few bids and sink a few more beers in the process…..
Beware the Rookie
Whilst Fantasy League is very much for the ultimate Fantasy Football fans, you will occasionally get the odd person whose heart isn’t in it to the same extent as yours, and/or their knowledge of football is virtually non-existent.
These can be co-workers who want in on the office banter, or friends who don’t like being outside the clique. In FPL, you call them casuals and they are the cannon fodder for your mini-leagues.
However, make no mistake; in FL, these managers can be dangerous. “How can this be?”, I hear you cry. You probably think they won’t understand good VFM, and you’d be right.
Yes, they will overpay for certain players, so that’s a good thing regarding my point about getting as much money spent as possible. However, what you ideally want is your main opponents spending their money early on. Short of absurd luck or the rest of you having a spectacularly bad auction, these managers aren’t going to win or even trouble you in your quest for glory once the season starts. Novices use two main guides to determine the players they will try to acquire: last season’s points or players they’ve heard of, i.e. the Salahs, Agueros and Sterlings of this world.
The problem is that they have a third guide: you. They know that you’re a Fantasy footballing demon, that you spend more time watching and thinking about football than they do sleeping, and that your mantlepiece is adorned with countless trophies representing your previous victories.
Therefore, if you think a player is worth trying to acquire, by default they think the same thing too and will try to outbid you. Trust me, there are few things in life more frustrating than bidding for a player where you’re certain that your bid will be the winning one (particularly when it’s to get a player for free), and some manager, who you know for certain had never heard of that player until the point at which their name came out of your mouth a few seconds ago, outbidding you.
It can almost be a Pavlovian reaction for them; every opening bid someone makes is instantly raised by this person. Now I don’t want to get all Machiavellian, but one way to deal with this is to nominate a player who you don’t want, and who you know that no one with any Fantasy footballing pedigree will want, and sit back gleefully when this manager outbids you and is left with a total donkey.
As my last piece said, Fantasy League is all about schadenfreude, and it’s up to you in these situations whether or not you let the manager in question know that you’ve just sold them a complete pup.
If you want them to fall into the same trap again, you may want to keep shtum but, equally, you may want them to think twice before instinctively outbidding you, given that they now realise the danger that you could be bluffing again.
I should add here that whilst there are few things more frustrating than one of these managers in full flow, there are also fewer things funnier than when you get two such managers in the same auction who bid one another up to ridiculous heights over a player who is worth a fraction of what they end up paying.
Make Your Bids Loud and Clear
This is my final piece of advice for the auction itself but is another you should ignore at your peril as auctioneers are human and pubs can be noisy places. I don’t think I’ve attended an auction where the auctioneer hasn’t missed someone’s bid at some point in the evening, and whilst the bidder will normally point out the error before the gavel comes down, it’s been known for two managers to each think they’ve bought the same player and for the problem to only come to light once it’s too late. So be sure to check that your bid has been registered rather than assuming, just because you’ve heard yourself, that everyone else has too.
After the Auction
I’ll talk in more detail in a later article about tactics for the remainder of the season but the general piece of advice I’ll give right now is this: try not to kneejerk.
Remember, this version of the game is very much a marathon rather than a sprint. Even when your player has gone 10 games without scoring, it doesn’t mean that they won’t score in the remaining 28 fixtures.
I appreciate that in FPL, you absolutely should care because you can bring him in at any time, but FL is about looking at the season holistically and whilst I would be a liar if I said it isn’t hugely frustrating when your star player blanks week after week, it’s ultimately about what they do over the course of 38 games.
The original Fantasy League game is back for the 2019/20 season – PLAY HERE!
