In every season Fantasy Football has many frustrating moments when your transfers backfire. The statistics deceive us or plain old bad luck leads to clever decisions being trampled all over by a mini-league rival’s seemingly ill-advised pick. It is tempting to deal with these events by taking multiple point hits to bring in short-lived bandwagons, but that often ends up ruining your team structure and composition. Here I detail an interesting challenge for those in the Fantasy doldrums to hopefully bring some Christmas cheer.

To remind ourselves that the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is a marathon, not a sprint, I usually try to set targets in terms of overall rank for stages in the season. In the last couple of years, my strategy has been :

Stage I : Stabilize inside top 50k by December 1st by taking some punts while building team value.

Stage II : Push into top 10k (for at least 1 Gameweek) before New Year’s, by exploiting the festive fixture pile-up and casuals’ low awareness of deadlines/transfers at this time.

Stage III : Defend position in the lead up to double Gameweeks in Gameweeks 30-34 by making sure all the explosive heavily owned players are in your team without taking multiple hits.

Stage IV : Finish on a high, in top 1k by May.

Now a lot has been said about how this season has been an absolute train-wreck for so many good FPL managers. Those with a strong history like Mark, Jonty, Innsie, Triggerlips (just to mention a few) are stuck in the doldrums with 200k-500k ranks. With this in mind, I’ve torn up my target projections from pre-season, and have now gone for :

Stage I : Settle for staying within top 500k (or even 1 million) by December 1st – any six-figure rank will do at the moment.

Stage II : Push into top 100k by New Year’s by exploiting the  festive fixture pile-up.

Stage III : Attack by gambling on the Double Gameweeks by using Bench Boost, Triple Captain or Wildcard chips to get into top 50k.

Stage IV : Finish – Aim for top 10k by May.

To motivate Stage II in this marathon, and give us something to cheer for during the holiday Gameweeks, I’d like to set up a small Community Challenge called the “Festive 100k”.

The aim is to get into the Top 100k by New Year’s Day’s fixtures (Gameweek 20 this year). That gives us five more Gameweeks!

Note that this is not going to be a separate mini-league. For the next five Gameweeks, please use the comment thread in this article to track progress and whether Christmas will bring a rise or fall in the rankings. Good luck, and see you on the other side of 100k.