FFS Mini-Leagues & Community Competitions Gameweek 12

Welcome to the latest round-up of the Fantasy Football Scout mini-leagues and community competitions, covering Gameweek 12 in FPL and Gameweek 28 in Fantasy Eliteserien.

Head-to-Head Leagues

Craig Johnson (aka Bouncebackability) maintained his 3-point advantage at the top of the FFS Head-to-Head leagues following an 82 to 63 victory over David Meechan (aka David Meechan). 

Having made money by selling Aguero to buy Vardy in Gameweek 11, Craig invested his spare cash to upgrade Connolly to Jimenez. Both recent acquisitions scored to help him to a weekly total of 82 points, the joint-highest in League 1 along with Grant Barclay (aka Jake Donahue).

Owen Walker (aka Zan Scott Talent) inflicted only a second defeat of the season on callum croal (aka Jambo17) to move above him in the table. The narrow 1-point victory takes early-pacesetter Owen up to second. 

Another single-point win sees Aleksander Våge Nilsen (aka AleksanderVN) move up to third. The Norwegian, who often shares his thoughts on Twitter, featured in one of Joe’s Meet the Manager interviews last year.

Pavle Ziman finally lost his 100% winning record in League 6 Division 5 falling to a 51-66 defeat at the hands of Alex Stephens. This means that the only managers with perfect starts are all in League 8. 

Maximum points sees both Ammar Mirza in Division 26 and Adam Hardwidge in Division 110 establish whopping 12-point leads, while Vladimir Stojiljkovic is ahead by 6 points in Division 77.

At 234th overall, David Hurley has the best rank out of the 5,983 managers in the Head-to-Head leagues. Despite doing so well he has lost three times in Division 70 of League 7 and is tied on points with Brian Doyle. Although he’s comfortably ahead on rank-difference.

Luck of the Draw

Overall rank is no guarantee of success in the Head-to-Head Leagues. 

Currently 1,461 overall Robert Wyld is ninth in Division 44 of League 7 with 18 points out of 36. Also on 18 points Mithun Karsandas – currently in the top 10,000 – is tenth in Division 133 of League 8.

At the opposite end of the luck spectrum, Roman Tadic in League 8 Division 95 has the same number of points as Robert and Mithun despite an overall rank of 5,538,893. Roman trails Robert by 282 FPL points!

However, perhaps the luckiest manager in the Head-to-Head Leagues is Kyuri Park in Division 8 of League 5. Kyuri occupies a promotion spot with 24 points even though he has the worst rank of any manager in his division – 2,609,580.

He’s level on points with Pro Pundit Sam Bonfield, who is 18,761 overall, and ahead of another Pro Pundit in Holly Shand.

A fixtures table will be published in the Scout’s Guide to Gameweek 13 ahead of the deadline. However, if you would like to find out who you are playing next before then, follow this link. Use your browser’s find in page function (Ctrl+F) to locate managers. All this information and more is contained in the main Head-to-Head page.

Fantasy Football Scout Mini-Leagues

In Gameweek 11 a number of previous leaders were punished for either not owning John Lundstram or for leaving him on the bench. Gameweek 12 was rather less dramatic.

Although after taking an 8-point hit, Mohammad Hafiz Emran has slipped from first to fourth in our Fantasy Football Scout mini-league. Mohammad sold Perez along with Man City duo De Bruyne and Aguero, and replaced them with Jimenez, Mane, and Lucas Moura. 

In contrast, new leader Berkan Chelikhan benched Mane in favour of Todd Cantwell. Berkan nonetheless notched an impressive 81 points to claim top spot. 

This is his sixth FPL season with his best finish of 3,495 coming in 2015/16. Aside from an early Gameweek 2 Wildcard, he has not taken any hits or played any chips and is now up to 45th overall.

There are currently 43,679 people participating in the Fantasy Football Scout mini-league, to join them enter code ooyz44 in your Leagues’ section on the FPL site. 

Martin Dixon made it two weeks at number one in our FFS Members mini-league and is up to 462nd overall.

Martin benefited from a strong bench with Soyuncu replacing Mendy, boosting his score by 8 points to 79.

The code to join the FFS Members League can be found on the Members page. 

Community Mini-Leagues and Competitions

In TorresMagic’s Last Man Standing the safety score for Gameweek 12 was 52 points, which saw 182 managers eliminated. The threshold for elimination increased to 8% for Gameweek 13.

2,618 managers have departed the competition so far with 2,285 left to battle it out for the coveted title of Last Man Standing. It is still possible to join them: entries are accepted over the international break – use the code bcvy39 in your Leagues’ section on the FPL site. However you must pass all the previous safety scores to qualify.

Aside from bragging rights, the winner will receive a free Fantasy Football Scout Membership for the 2020/21 season.

In the Pundit’s Play-Off Community Tournament The Keane Fifteen maintained their 100% winning start as WhenTheOWENgetsTough lost for the first time this season. Winners of the Avatar competition, A Whole Lawro B*llocks, inflicted their first defeat.

Toblerone52 – Hung like a Hamster brought us a full round up of MatchWeek 4 as the first period drew to a close. He also explained the latest draft process which takes place ahead of MatchWeek 5.

Neale Rigg (aka SkontoRigga) increased his lead to 16 points at the top of the FFS Mods & Cons mini-league as Andy Goddard (aka Andy G) moved to second. Andy’s three Leicester players contributed 40 points to his weekly total. 

Lower down the league, a well-timed hit for RedLightning saw him jump up nearly one million places from 1,991,281 to 1,007,906. Pukki and David Silva were replaced by Raul Jimenez and James Maddison resulting in a net gain of 16 points.

John Holmes has retaken the lead from Mark Taylor as they continue to tussle for supremacy in RedLightning’s Top 10k Any Season mini-league. Managers with a top 10k finish may join them in the league using the code m0tq9y.

The pair are now level on points, just outside the top thousand, but John has his nose in front because he’s made fewer transfers – 11 to Mark’s 13.

Surprisingly John doesn’t currently own Jamie Vardy, having sold him in Gameweek 5 ahead of fixtures against Man United and Spurs. Following those two matches Vardy has scored 8 goals in 6 appearances.

Indeed the former leader in Chaballer’s Top 1,000 HoF League, Tom Freeman, revealed in his Meet the Manager interview with Joe that he had targeted Vardy specifically with Gameweek 7 in mind.

Tom was replaced at the top by Frenchman Francois Jacquemot, who last led in Gameweek 5. Francois played his Wildcard and captained Vardy on his way to 97 points. He changed 10 of his players as he reshuffled his pack to good effect gaining 63 immediate transfer points.

Francois is 672nd in the Career Hall of Fame and Tom is ninth. Managers in the top 1,000 of the Career HoF may enter the league using the code beeps2.

The Great and the Grand

2016/17 FPL winner Ben Crabtree is now 55 points ahead in the exclusive FPL Champions League. The Everton fan moves up to 24,368 overall. Without any Liverpool players for their upcoming favourable fixtures, Ben will be relying on Sterling, De Bruyne, and Aubameyang to deliver the points. 

There’s a real scrap taking place behind Ben with four managers separated by just 5 points. FFS ProPundit and 2014/15 FPL winner Simon March now heads the chasing pack, as 2017/18 champion Yusuf Sheikh dropped to third.

Meanwhile last year’s FPL winner Adam Levy is having his worst season ever, currently ranked just outside the top two million. This is Adam’s seventh season playing FPL and, apart from his first season, he has always finished inside the top 100k.

Before moving onto Fantasy Eliteserien, there’s a notable Norwegian who is doing particularly well in FPL. World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen is up to 32nd overall. Last season he reached a season-high rank of 106 in Gameweek 20 before falling back to finish 24,105. 

This is his sixth FPL season, his best previous finish was 2,397 in 2017/18. 

The grandmaster is yet to take any hits or use any of his chips. He has saved a transfer on four occasions in order to make two transfers a week or two later. In Gameweek 12 he used his one free transfer to sell Sterling for Son, increasing his bank balance to £2.4m.

Fantasy Eliteserien 

Svein Johansen extended his lead in the FFS Eliteserien mini-league to 7 points. An impressive Round 28 score of 75 points sees him move up to 12th overall. 

Gameweek-22 leader Thomas Wickstrøm remains second in the mini-league with Martin Osmond-Smith up to third. 

Martin’s 87 points gave him a Gameweek rank of 54! He leapt from 102nd overall to 36th. He managed double-figure hauls from four of his players, including 5.3%-owned defender Sondre Solholm Johansen and 3.5%-owned midfielder Ola Brynhildsen.

Svein is 53 points behind Håvard Gustad in the battle to be crowned Fantasy Eliteserien champion. Håvard has led for eleven of the last twelve Gameweeks. And with two rounds to go has an 18-point advantage over Jens Garratt in second.

Submissions

If you are running a community competition and would like the latest scores included in future Round-ups, please email us a summary of the current leaders and a link to your league, spreadsheet or head-to-head competition to geoff@fantasyfootballscout.co.uk

Thank you to RedLightning and matzi11a for their contributions to this article.