Auction Based Fantasy Football

It’s struck me over the years that I’ve been following the Scout that the auction-based side of the game has been woefully neglected/under-represented, so I’ve decided to put that right with my first ever article which will talk you through what it is and how to go about playing it successfully*.

*by successfully, I mean enjoyably, as sadly I can’t guarantee you ‘success’!

What is auction-based fantasy football?

It’s fantasy football, Jim, but not as you know it if you’ve only ever played FPL, Sky, or newspaper games.

Players have no predetermined price; how much a player costs you is entirely down to how much other managers are prepared to make you pay.

You get together with a load of friends and/or work colleagues, preferably in licensed premises, and build your squads for the coming year.  Each manager has the same starting pot and you take it in turns to nominate a player with an opening bid (which can be zero), after which bids can be made by other managers until all bidding is done and the auctioneer brings down their gavel. I’ve been playing this for two decades through fantasyleague, the people who introduced fantasy football to the UK, with several leagues in my workplace which allows for promotion and relegation between the divisions; in my opinion, it smashes the other forms of the game into the long grass.

I already play FPL so why would I want to do this?

Quite simply, it’s the purest form of fantasy football and, dare I say it, the most fun.  Your squad is unique to you; no two managers can have the same players.  There are no template teams.  Let me ask you this: how much genuine joy do you get out of seeing Aguero, who you’ve captained, score a hattrick, knowing that every single one of your mates/league members (and probably 95% of the wider FPL community) also has Aguero and has captained him too?  Imagine a scenario where you’re the only manager in your league who has Aguero.

It’s something which is pretty rare in FPL unless you’ve taken a complete flyer on a player and are the only person to own them.  And even then, you know that everyone will swoop to get that player in their team for the following week, so the joy is relatively short-lived.  A number of seasons back, most of my fellow managers thought I’d sneezed when I picked up Michu for free, and then had to watch on with regret as he had that incredible first season……

Isn’t it the same as the draft game?

Not quite.  With a draft, you don’t have to pay for a player so if it’s your turn and that player hasn’t gone, you get him.  With the auction, whilst you can propose any player you wish when it comes to your turn, you only win that player if you’re the highest bidder when the bidding ends.

I’m ultra-competitive: how do I win?!

Here are my tips for a successful auction:

Do your prep

I realise that if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re someone who already takes their fantasy football relatively seriously, and doubtless I’m teaching my granny to suck eggs.  However, prep before the auction is crucial.  I don’t think I’ve ever attended an auction where we haven’t ended up laughing at some poor sap who has just paid good money for a player who injured themselves last week and will miss the first half of the season.  Or where they are in the process of packing their cases for their dream move to Real Madrid.

You should think not just about who you want but also at what price.  It’s all well and good saying to yourself that you’ll have Aguero at any cost, but what if another manager has the same idea and the two of you end up bidding yourselves up to a ridiculous level?  Determine pre-set levels at which a player no longer represents value for money.

Look too at players’ susceptibility to get injured.  Remember, this isn’t FPL; if Salah gets ruled out for half the season, you can’t simply swap him for Mane (unless, by some miracle, Mane is still a free agent) and do you even want to risk dropping Salah on the basis that someone else may decide it’s worth carrying a crock for a few months given what that crock can do once he’s back on the pitch?  You cannot legislate for freak injuries but if you know that someone has a dodgy hamstring/knee/ankle and only needs to be doing up their boots to tweak something, either avoid them or set yourself a lower limit on what you’d be prepared to pay for them.

Think about which players will play in televised games.  Unlike FPL, fantasyleague allow you to make substitutions between games, meaning that you can, in principle, play more than 11 players over a weekend.  Nowadays, with the vast number of televised fixtures, this problem is less common, but there’s nothing more frustrating than having to pick three out of five strikers because they’re all playing at the same time, and seeing the two you’ve left on the bench bang in the goals while the three you’ve chosen blank.

Know your fellow managers

Fantasy football should be a game devoid of emotion except for when you are screaming at the tv when your player hits the post instead of the back of a gaping goal, or your triple Liverpool defence concede a consolation goal in the fifth minute of injury time.  However, not every manager approaches it in this way.  Your mate who is a Spurs season ticket holder couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t have Harry Kane in his squad.  This means that you’re probably not going to get him (unless said mate has already blown too much of his budget on other players and doesn’t have enough to outbid you) but you certainly don’t want this Spurs fan paying anything less than top dollar for Kane.  Knowing your friends’ weaknesses for certain players lets you either rule them out in your pre-auction prep or set yourself an inflation-adjusted price, given that you know someone else will be doing everything they can to get that player.  It’s dog-eat-dog at the auction and the less you telegraph which players you desperately want (as opposed to those you’d be happy to own; a bid, after all, indicates a certain level of desire!), the fewer times you’ll find yourself wanting to slap another manager for bidding you up out of spite.

Be prepared to scramble

I’ve never, in my 21 seasons of playing fantasyleague, had an auction go exactly to plan.  As Robbie Burns famously said, the best laid plans of mice and men often get messed up by drunken idiots bidding too much for that player you really wanted.  You’ll think to yourself beforehand ‘no one will dare go over £Xm for Y’ and then before you know it, that’s exactly what’s happened.  In those situations you’re faced with two choices: shake your head and magnanimously (and smugly) let the other manager get the player at what you know is too high a price; or grit your teeth, man up, and go even higher, knowing that only hindsight in nine months’ time will tell you which decision was right.

Don’t get too drunk

It’s a recipe for disaster and will cause unwelcome flashbacks every time you look at your team over the coming season.

Anything else we need to do before the auction?

Absolutely.  Think carefully about what local rules you want for your league both for the auction and for when the season starts.

If you’re playing with 15 other friends, you may not want to all pick squads of 18 players because a) the auction will go on all night (long before the end of which, everyone will have lost the will to live) and b) there’s little point in managers having to pick up a defensive midfielder from a promoted club who gets a nosebleed every time he crosses the halfway line.

Decide how/when managers can transfer in and out players from the leftovers from the auction; do you want a free-for-all whereby it’s a race over the first weekend to transfer in that season’s Michu or Yaya Toure?  These things are REALLY important if you want everyone to stay friends. Determine too what happens with new players transferred in post-auction; perhaps carry over any unspent funds from the auction and add them to a new pot for each manager to spend/bid on new players during the season.

This all sounds too good to be true so what are the drawbacks?

Ok, so in the interests of full disclosure, here’s the principal kicker: it’s pretty difficult to turn things around if it’s clear that you’ve selected a squad of complete turkeys at the auction, or have put all your eggs in only a few baskets by splashing all your money on Salah, Aguero and Sterling, only for all three of them to collide with one another on the opening weekend and get season-ending injuries.  On that latter basis alone, it’s worth hedging your bets and spreading the money around your squad, at least as much as you dare whilst still getting in some big hitters.

This version of the game is all about the auction and if you’re playing against other managers worth their salt, the player list will be picked bare before the season starts, so don’t expect to be able to ship out too many players post-auction and replace them with big scorers, notwithstanding the few unforeseen gems who come to light over the first few weekends.

Conclusion

Another drawback: whether or not you follow my advice above, you’ll probably have a stonking hangover the next day.  Auctions are enormous fun but are also tense, taut affairs.  However you approach it though, enjoy yourself and relish the fact that it’s a football-focussed evening with your mates, the kind of which don’t come around that frequently for some of us..