Here’s Andrew Ferguson with his 2018/2019 season Sky Sports Fantasy Football review. Andrew finished in the top 500 in 2017/18.
Andrew Ferguson with his Sky Sports Fantasy Football review
Sky Sports fantasy football 2018_2019 Review
Overall Rank: 88
Variance from Last Season: improvement of 274 places
Last 5 Seasons Trend: 1,014, 598, N/A, 362, 88
Summary
The upward trajectory (excluding my year off) continues with my first top 100 finish. As the graphic below shows, following an initial unpredictable spell for the first third of the season I then settled into a steady downward curve as I raced up the leaderboard, managing my transfers reasonably well until the second overhaul and aligned with the overall transfer usage metric. At the second overhaul I was in 91st position and decided to take some risks to attempt an assault on winning it, climbed to 17th overall for a number of weeks but then my luck, and transfers, ran out and my rank declined to an overall finish of 88th which overall I am very pleased with particularly as I made some avoidable mistakes which I will try to avoid next year.
My transfer usage in the below graphic was pretty steady throughout the season with some dips around GW3 (just before the overhaul), GW14 and GW32. Looking back these multi-transfers were used to reshape my team a little and move budget around which isn’t the best use of them. Using two transfers the week prior to the first overhaul was also not a good play, better planning was required although I do remember it being a panic move as I had reached the top 150 pretty quickly and wanted to maintain the quick start. I hit the second overhaul with only 9 transfers left which again, isn’t enough, as I dipped as quickly as I rose from GW32 when I ran out.
The green dotted line is my actual transfers usage, whereby the amber line is what I want to try to achieve next season with the extra discipline hopefully coming from the points below.
For the majority of the season I have played with a maximum of 2 strikers, only playing 4-3-3 for eight of the gameweeks; interestingly, the majority of these weeks yielded a dip in overall rank. I mainly followed the theme of value at the back with players such as Robertson, Laporte, Luiz etc, complemented by cheaper ‘talisman’ midfielders such as Maddison and Anderson and premium midfielders such as Sterling and Hazard. Due to this heavy investment I could never really afford more than one premium striker at any one time and thankfully Jimenez at 7.9m became an insane enabler. For the most part this worked well and although I missed out on Salah’s hattrick against Bournemouth and both Aguero’s hattricks around GW25/26, in theory the strategy has been successful with a good finishing overall rank.
Post-season thoughts
· It’s a long old season and similarly to TFF, I need to manage my transfers better. This includes not using two transfers to get in, and then remove, a Friday or Monday night duffer for the 2-point captaincy! I will try and ration them to ensure I have enough left for an even attack on the ranks up to the final gameweek.
· Stick with a staple team based around my plans above, ride out the rough times and enjoy the good ones, and use transfers to optimise the key picks for the fixture runs.
· My formation needs to remain flexible to ensure I am only one move away from any transfer. Owning the highest-value player in the three main positions will help with this.
· Don’t panic when I don’t own the overwhelming captain pick for the day. As above, I missed out on multiple hattricks and still finished with a good rank. Strength in numbers of a solid team with multiple ways of scoring points seems to be key rather than putting all my eggs into captaincy options. Hitting both is the holy grail and I will plan better next season to try and maximise this more.
· Captain defenders and maybe even keepers more. How many 2-point attacking captains did you have this season?
· My fixture planner was incredibly valuable this season, as it usually is, as it highlights good runs of fixtures from December onwards to maximise transfers until the end of the season.
· Don’t make short term picks with one or two games in mind (unless they are serious captain options towards the end of the season). With this in mind and the points above, I could have effectively saved about 10-15 transfers which would have come in handy at the tail end of the season!
· Looking at the all the points I have made in regard to my own season and the points above, the strategy I will likely follow next season (assuming the same formations apply) and following the first overhaul is a 5-3-2 with a premium keeper, 3 premium defenders, 2 budget defender, 2 premium midfielders, 1 budget midfielder, 1 premium striker and 1 budget striker. I will attempt to roughly track my transfers to my plan above then look for opportunities to arise due to fixture runs on midfielders and strikers only.
Saying all this, Sky have promised some big changes to the gameplay in readiness for next season. It will be interesting to see what they do and how it will affect our strategies for next season; hopefully the changes won’t be too intrusive as the Sky game probably has the most balanced point-scoring system of them all.
Hopefully some of these points resonate with some managers. Please feel free to comment, add more points or let me know how your season has gone @Fergi222 on Twitter.
Thanks for reading and following this season and I am already looking forward to GW1!
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