All you need to know about Fantasy draft: How to play, rules, “snakes” and auctions

Our guide to the draft format of Fantasy Football has everything you need to know, from an outline of the general concept to tips on making a list of key targets.

Whether you’re playing the Draft version of Fantasy Premier League (FPL), the more customisable Fantrax or the auction-based Original Fantasy League, we’ve got advice below.

The Essentials

Draft games take the basic idea of selecting individual players as part of a squad that scores points for things those players do in matches and makes one fundamental modification: any given player is only available to be ‘owned’ by one manager at any given time.

If another manager in your league drafts Bruno Fernandes then that means that you can’t have him unless you offer that manager a trade for one of your own players that he finds acceptable (Mohamed Salah or Kevin De Bruyne perhaps?) or the manager simply drops Bruno from his squad to the pool of unowned players (maybe because Bruno has an injury that will keep him out for some weeks).

This model of player ownership in draft fantasy football means that you are only competing in mini-leagues. There is no overall ranking or effective ownership to consider.

It also means that, beyond a fairly standard size of eight to ten teams in a mini-league, the managing experience is prone to become too much about luck and survival. With a 14-team draft league, for example, if a star player is transferred abroad or lost to a serious injury in Gameweek 3, it can be almost impossible to replace them competitively as any player of even moderate value is likely to have been snapped up as a regular starter for one of the other managers.

Obviously, playing a draft Premier League game is not going to be much fun if one manager is able to acquire all the well-known heavy-hitters while another has to make do with bench players from promoted clubs, so players are allocated by a “draft” (selection process) that typically follows one of two procedures.

Snake Draft

The first is purely based on turn-taking. The managers in the mini-league are given a drafting position which is usually randomly drawn, but could be set according to other criteria if the league is continuing from a previous season.

By default such a draft will “snake“, which is to say that the manager who receives the first pick in the first round of choices will also get the last pick in the second round then the first pick again in the third round and so on. So, in a ten-manager “snake” draft, the manager with first pick would also get picks 20 (end of second round), 21 (start of third round) and 40 (end of fourth round). Somebody has to go first, but this approach tries to limit the potential advantage that that brings.

Auction

A positional snake draft is the only type available in the Draft FPL game. It is also the default for a head-to-head points league in Fantrax, but in that game an auction is a popular alternative. An auction is also how players are picked in Original Fantasy League.

The auction draft procedure, as its name suggests, is based on bidding. Draft positions will still be allocated, but that aspect is much less powerful. The manager allocated first place in the first round of bidding does not get to automatically select a player for their team. Instead they select a player to be put up for auction.

As with standard FPL, in this type of draft each manager will have a budget to work within, but unlike standard FPL there are no set prices for players and any unspent money is simply lost.

The manager selecting a player to be put up for auction automatically becomes the opening bidder for that player, though the proposing manager can choose the starting amount. If no other manager bids for that player then they are allocated to the proposing manager at that starting amount, but, of course, other managers can make bids and the player will ultimately go to whoever bids the most.

Each player selected for auction will be sold to the highest bidder until all squad places are filled for all managers.

Technically, there’s nothing to stop a manager diving into a draft completely cold, but as in all forms of Fantasy Football some groundwork beforehand is a valuable investment.

Make a list

Whether your draft is snake or auction, a ranking list of some kind is going to be very helpful. If you are awarded first pick in a snake draft, which player will you take? If that player is gone by the time it’s your turn, who is your second choice?

It’s not necessary to rank every player available in your game. In Draft FPL, for example, if there are eight managers in your mini-league then that means exactly 24 strikers must be drafted and there’s no point ranking more than that. Fantrax allows customisation of roster (squad) sizes with a maximum and minimum number of players required at each of the four positions, but you could still make a rough guess at how many strikers will be taken overall.

You might also decide that beyond, say, the eighth goalkeeper on your ranking list, you don’t really care who you get after that and just make a ‘gut’ decision at the time based on which players are still available.

The final list of any rankings you do make should be arranged regardless of player position. If, for example, you are very keen to draft Trent Alexander-Arnold, it’s useful to know that he’s your first choice defender but for draft purposes it’s essential to know whether you would select him before or after Jamie Vardy, Son Heung-min or Emiliano Martinez.

A ranking list for a Fantrax auction draft might well have the same fundamental order of preference, but will also need to include an indication of how much of your budget you are realistically willing to spend on that player. Kevin De Bruyne might be your number one choice, but another manager might be willing to outbid you for the Belgian’s services almost regardless of the cost. A wise manager will know when to bail out of such a situation in order to pick up a better value alternative later on.

Your rankings could be made on paper, or on a spreadsheet, that you use as a guide during your draft, marking off players as they are selected. Both games also allow you to build these lists within the game itself which helps with quick decisions in a live draft, but is almost essential if you can’t participate in the draft as it happens.

If you’re not online during the set draft time then the game will automatically make picks for you according to general rankings of its own. Not only can those rankings be a little outdated or over-simplified, but managers drafting live will notice that you are ‘auto-drafting’ according to the default rankings and could use that information to their advantage.

Free agents and waivers

At the end of the draft, any undrafted players will become the pool of free agents. These players can be brought into your squad in exchange for you dropping a player in your squad into the free agency pool.

Many leagues augment this with a system of waivers. For a certain period at the start of every Gameweek, players cannot automatically acquire free agent players. Instead, managers submit a waiver request. This is a cross between a draft pick and a free agent transfer.

Each manager will have a waiver priority. At the start of the season the manager who had the last pick in the first round of the draft will usually have the first waiver priority and so on. The moment you acquire a player via waivers you drop to the end of that queue again.

Once waivers have been processed at their deadline (usually a day or two before the next round of matches starts) transfers become a free for all until the next Gameweek and it’s first come, first served on the free agents.

Scoring system

If you are playing Draft FPL the scores your players get each Gameweek are exactly the same as in the standard game except for one important difference: in Draft FPL there is no captaincy. A small change, but a very important one.

Getting a Sadio Mané hat-trick is still very useful, but there is no way of amplifying that through captaining him which makes the most elite players just a little less valuable than in the standard game.

Fantrax scoring is a different thing altogether and should be considered carefully when making your ranking list for your draft. It is based on a system originally devised a few years ago called TOGGA which sought to reward players for their performance in many more categories than just goals, assists and saves.

Fantrax has tweaked the basic TOGGA scoring in a few different ways and they recently released their latest version which looks like this:

This approach does even things up a bit and gives value to players like defensive midfielders who are often neglected in standard FPL, but, as you can see from the high values given to goals and assists, being involved at the sharp end of scoring is still the most valuable skill a player can have.

As for Original Fantasy League, it’s at the opposite end of the spectrum: you need only be concerned about goals, assists, appearances, clean sheets and goals conceded.

GETTING STARTED

If you have enough friends/workmates/unwary family members, Draft FPL, Fantrax and Original Fantasy League allow you to create a league amongst yourselves. If you go down the Fantrax route almost everything about the league is customisable including all the scoring, how free agency works and whether the league standings are based on cumulative points (like FPL) or head-to-head contests with other managers.

If you don’t have a ready-made set of opposing managers Draft FPL allows you to Join a Public League with a few options about type and size of league. If you go down this route, be prepared to draft almost immediately. You will be allocated to a newly-created mini-league of the type you requested as soon as enough other managers choose the same options and that is unlikely to take more than a few minutes. The draft will commence thirty minutes after the league is created.

Draft FPL allows you to be in up to 10 private leagues and three public leagues (each, of course, with a freshly drafted team).

The Fantrax approach to draft leagues is somewhere between Draft FPL’s concept of Private and Public. All Fantrax leagues are, in that sense, private. They are all set up by, and subject to the administration of, a “Commissioner” who set the league up originally or has since taken over its management.

If those Commissioners would like more players in their league than they can recruit personally they are able to advertise the spare places on a page Fantrax provides for this purpose. The page gives the size and scoring type of the league along with the type of draft and when that draft is currently scheduled to take place. You can click the name of the league to see more details about it or click the Join button if you are ready to apply to the Commissioner for a place.