“Will Chelsea qualify with ease? I think they will, but it won’t be easy.” – Jamie Redknapp
“Footballers these days often have to use their feet.” – Michael Owen
“The pass for Wright-Phillips was overweight.” – Alan Shearer
“He had it on a plate, he had the sausage, bacon and eggs on it as well, but he couldn’t take it.” – Chris Kamara
“The thing about goal scorers is that they score goals.” – Tony Cottee
“After Chelsea scored, Bolton epitulated.” – Paul Merson
Ahh those wonderful pundits, how they bring colour to the game we love so much. From Paul Merson trying to say Matteo Guendouzi and getting it so tragically and hilariously wrong, to Roy Keane verbally obliterating, well, pretty much anyone who’s ever kicked a football – what would we do without them? So in tribute, we are fittingly theming this season’s community tournament on the great Premier League Pundits, with each team being named after their favourite football expert.
What is the Community Tournament?
For those of us who have struggled to make it near the dizzy heights of a top 10k OR, a pathway to glory is still available to all in the Pundits Playoff. This season’s Community Tournament has it all – FFP, players drafts, transfer windows, both H2H and classic league formats, bonus points and, most excitingly, Champions League and Europa League style finals.
How the competition works
Twelve* teams of up to 15 FPL players from the FFS Community go head to head over 22 matchweeks. (*might stretch to 24 teams if we have enough Team Managers step forward)
The competition commences with a player draft, and the matchweeks are split up into 4 periods, each with a transfer window in between.
At the end of the four periods, the top 8 teams will progress to the Pundits Playoff Champions League finals, the bottom 4 will traipse their way to the Pundits Playoff You’re-Ropey League Finals.
Prizes
The winners of the PPCL Finals will be crowned Community Champions and receive free FFS memberships for the following season. (Thanks Geoff!)
There will also hopefully be other equally dazzling, but much less expensive prizes to be won along the road that I will be able to announce as we journey through the competition.
How teams are formed, the Draft process and Financial Fair Play
Each team will have a manager, who will be allocated a budget to buy players with. Every single applicant for the competition will be given a value based on their scores from GW1-8, ranging from £1m all the way up to £100m.
The managers will be given time to recruit a certain number of players from FFS, and after that there will be a player draft to fill the teams. More details for this will be revealed once we have confirmed the managers.
At the end of each period, the transfer window will open, players can be released, and the drafting fun begins again.
How to sign up
First and foremost we need 12/24 team managers, without whom the competition cannot commence. Managers need to be able to commit to running their teams for the entirety of the competition (GWs 9-35), and be comfortable using a simple google sheet to submit their teams on a weekly basis. If you are up for being a team manager, send an email to punditsplayoff@gmail.com with your FFS Username, FPL ID# and the pundit(s) you wish to name your team after.
DEADLINE FOR THIS IS FRIDAY 13TH SEPTEMBER.
Once we have a full complement of managers, we will release a second article with a registration portal for community members to sign up as players, just after gameweek 5.
The team sizes will depend on the number of applicants, but the highest we can have will be 360 (24 teams of 15).
Period info
Period 1 : GWs 9-12
Period 2 : GWs 13-20 (GW19 will not count)
Period 3 : GWs 22-26
Period 4 : GWs 27-32
Finals : GWs 33-35
(Above based on 12 teams, there’ll be an extra match week if we go with 24 teams so everyone gets to play each other)
Next article will be up in a week or so, big thanks to the rest of the community tournament committee – Swanmoretime, Bielsa’s Binoculars, rjcv177, TorresLove, Toblerone52, Mr Hindsight, Vobinho and Mr Perfectionist.
Who will win this year’s Community Tournament? Here’s Andy Townsend’s thoughts on it:
“I think one of these teams could win this.”
4 years, 7 months agoWaiting