FF247 Fantasy Football Site Team; The Season Wrap Up
Welcome to FF247 Fantasy Football Site Team; The Season Wrap Up.
GW39…. What’s the opposite of teambuilding?
We’ve all been there; be it at school, at Cub Scouts, at work or as part of a sports team. Some bright spark decides it’s raft building day in the naive hope that this somehow will strengthen bonds and ties and bring you all together into some sort of seamless unbeatable unit. Cue 11am on the edge of a freezing river and there are two distinct schools of thought already at play. The alpha males are out in force with their lofty ideas, staring one another down whilst some others stand back shrugging their cold shoulders with indifference and some others are cowering under the trees hoping nobody notices that they are even there. Some begrudged give and take occurs and an hour or two later a hybrid version of the plans is seemingly under way. Or so it appears anyway, planks are placed, planks are sneakily replaced, ropes are tied, ropes are deviously untied. Eventually the thing looks seaworthy and is pushed out on it’s voyage. Half way across the lake it looks like falling apart and casting it’s entire occupancy to the depths but ultimately the crew see the bigger picture and finally begin to work together to ensure they make it to the other side.
GW38 Round up
We shall begin as ever with our usual analysis of last week which saw us finish on 67 points, 16 above the overall average of 51. But without boring you to tears with the detail, 4 players performed (TAA, Mane, Kun (c) and Zaha), with a total of 52 between them, you can do the math and probably fill in our swear words to describe how the other 7 fared.
GW38 Team In Full;
Final Standings
The above resulted in our 15th green arrow since GW19, which may sound fantastic but it was a slow and steady rise to say the least! We were 84,654th prior to that and ended up at 5,757th come the end, with 2,406 points overall. We achieved our highest season rank in GW38 itself which is always a good point at which to peak, and we beat our best ever overall rank, albeit by just a couple of hundred places. Anytime you set off on this journey the hallowed (for whatever reason!) Top 10k seems to be a reasonably accepted aim for success, we prefer to think that to beat your own personal best, be that 5k or 50k or 500k is a more reasonable target to set yourself. To that end, and with that excuse placed conveniently in our pocket, we achieved our goal.
Mini-league wise we don’t play in many, in fact the only two we even look at are the FF247 Contibutors League (the writers / wider team) and the Ryder Cup (GB&I vs the MLS lot). We won the former which is always pleasing, as it keeps them all in their place and we came 2nd in the latter, which was a bit disappointing but we beat the Yanks as a team so every silver cloud and all that.
Apparently we won the FF247 Division One Head-to-Head league too, gaining promotion in the process. Although we must admit (sorry Elle!) we hadn’t even noticed we were in it!
See you next season!
We appreciate it’s a bit of a pointless article, but who cares and all that, we just wanted to give you the final synopsis given as we know that many do follow it with interest along the way, and we are grateful to everyone who does.
We have an interview article in the offing with Pele (not that one!) who won the FF247 Regulars League and then after that we shall probably take a small but well earned break as we recharge our FPL batteries ahead of next season.
See you all soon!
You can follow how the site teams progressed all season by clicking here
Thanks to everyone for another great Season, the site team is a super helpful review each week to add that little sanity check to all of our teams. My thanks to everyone for their tips, input and help this Season. Roll on August.
Is this the Superbowl ? The little & large show has just been on the BBC halftime effort.
The final nail in the coffin that is the F A Cup. Oh Dear!
Its like floodgate opened once and thats it… 6-0 is too much.
…..
Yeeah come on Wolves Europa league
Kompany off to be player manager of Anderlecht. City no doubt planning a big replacement.
Wonder who. Pool apparently in talks with De Ligt. Maybe Raz has a bit more info, if hes around.
Heard de Ligt and Maguire both mentioned but I just wonder if they nip in for Alderweireld.
Maybe.
Having some early thoughts about next year. 3 City and 3 Pool wouldn’t seem a bad idea. Maybe Salah, Robertson, TAA, Aguero, Sterling and Laporte. Sadly it won’t be affordable unless the rest of the team is complete fodder! Sterling would be the man to miss out for me, which seems harsh after the cup final. I might even try 5-3-2 giving the scoring potential of the Pool full backs.
Personally I wouldn’t recommend the 5/3/2.
While on the one hand that (and the 5/2/3) are the only formations that allow for pretty much an elite starting XI – and that is hugely tempting – it’s a very inflexible formation (in terms of suddenly having to adjust it).
I think the good old 3/4/3 can be tweaked to become a 4/4/2 / 4/3/3 – even a 5/3/2 if the fixtures that week are good – whereas a 5/3/2 is it – because all your eggs are in one basket.
I speak from personal experience of running a 5/3/2 – albeit as an experimental side, not my main team. I was curious to see how it would go.
How did it go?
20k, believe it or not. There were some weeks where late injury calls meant the side auto-defaulted to a 4/3/3 or whatever, but I tried my best to keep it at 5 at the back – and the players coming in off the bench were so useless it didn’t really matter anyway.
Key thing though, which I forgot to mention above, was that not once did I actually captain a full back. It would always be Kun, or Salah – mainly the latter, if memory serves. (And doing that obviously helped with the ranking.)
The good weeks were good but as you can imagine, there were some truly terrible weeks.
The inflexibility was the most frustrating thing about that side.
I can see its appeal as the likes of Robbo / T-AA et al seem much more appealing than similarly priced mids.
Having said that, I think we will see a few good priced mids next season.
Hardly a disaster then. Given as you tried to stick to it fairly rigidly to be true to the experiment then it could have been even better with a degree of flexibility that allowed it off its reins when necessary.
Be interesting to see what price TAA and Robbo pop up at and what sort of mid you can get for similar money.
But that’s the key. You can’t experiment with that formation. You’re stuck with it. Its great appeal is that it allows a terrific starting XI. But the bench has to be utter dreck.
it probably exposes a flaw in my psychology, in that I think in choosing that formation that you can’t change it. It would destroy the purity of the idea. I loved the thought of succeeding with an unorthodox formation.
Whereas normally I’ll move things round fairly happily – finished this season with a 4/4/2 etc.
I’ve no doubt the entire Liverpool defence will cost an absolute arm and a leg, with the exception of Gomez perhaps. Maybe he’ll be the enabling way in if doubling on that defence.
Not sure but I think Baines at his peak was very expensive. I mean really exorbitant.
That’s what I meant, you stuck with the purity of the idea. It could be that you begin with the intention and then flex as and when but then it essentially just becomes any other team along the way. I actually think a more key decision is whether to go 2 or 3 up top. That ones a bit harder to suddenly change if you want to for whatever reason.
I think 5/3/2 was easier to manage in terms of elite players. 5/2/3 (that year) was harder – Kane/Lukaku/Kun (probably) was quite tough in keeping a strong back 5. But of course Salah was relatively cheap that year, making life easier.
@Kralin and Init, Interesting stuff there. I was surprised to see your final ranking, but looking into it a bit more, I suspect that you hit on the perfect season to trot out a 5 back and finish that high. Think it would almost be impossible to duplicate, assuming you don’t have incredible luck with captains all season and perform like the rest of us.
I looked back at the last 3 seasons before this one to see why you scored so well and noticed that the top scoring defenders this season really outperformed the top scoring guys from previous years. In fact so much so, that if they would have scored similar to the top scorers of previous seasons, you probably would have scored about 50 points less this season, which would have dropped your ranking to about 60-70k. Which is still not bad, btw.
15/16 season top 5 scoring defenders
172
166
153
152
150
16/17 season top 5 scoring defenders
178
177
170
142
135
17/18 season top 5 scoring defenders
175
165
156
146
143
This season top 5 scoring defenders
213
208
185
177
164
Perhaps when people talk about a 5 back next season we can just hit them with a link to this page so they can read this whole thread.
You’ll fall off your chair with surprise when I reveal it (the 20k finish) was the 17/18 season, not the one just finished. Think I set and forgot Salah as captain, however.
From your stats maybe this season was the one to push that formation. I may have another go next year, with the experimental XI. Though I know that b sides are a touchy area and if I do run it I’ll do it on the q.t.
I like the idea of looping back to this page.
I was thinking about it all earlier. The 5/3/2 is for the patient manager because once it’s set up, there’s not much left to do.
Well in that case, I think you missed an opportunity to finish inside the top 10 in FPL.
Thanks for all the comments. I think the formation topic will be much discussed. I would say the Pool defenders will probably be 7m or at most 7.5m. However you are right Gomez could be a good value option. This year I played 433 until I built TM and switched to 343 at GW17, which worked well.
Many thanks FF247 team, and congrats on your OR.
What about the score? (2406), Isn’t it your highest ever?.
Just a quick feed back:
* I discovered the site by chance at GW 17 or something while surfing the web for predicted lineups. I was familiar with the official FPL weekly scout selection, but never aware of “actual” team plans like yours. Yours looks far more realistic. You can’t come up with a new team each week as official FPL scout team selection.
*At first, my thought was “finally, found it. Copy paste and wait”. I did that four a couple of weeks, but then realized it’s a whole lot more than that. Captains picks, predictions, finally site team and then live chat. OMG, it’s a community here. Thereafter, I found my own way of managing my team rather than just copying site team.
* Even when I thought of of my self as “not worthy to reply to”, i found 3 of the site admins commenting to my post. I was really impressed.
*It was amazing and fun experience for me. This is my 2nd FPL season. My OR was 2 and half million last season, 190k this one. Very happy with that. Would be better if I discovered the site earlier
*Thank you again, hats off to you FF247 team.
Nice post. That’s an outstanding OR for a second season and I’m sure you’ll push on to greater heights next year.
I had a similarish experience, many moons ago (though in my dozy way, and to my regret, it took me about 4 seasons to stumble across a site like this). Up until then I was floundering round with ORs in the millions. Making it all up as I was going along and getting nowhere fast.
MHD, we’re very glad you found us!
That’s a lovely post my friend and makes all the hard work behind the scenes worth it.
One thing we actively do is ensure that every RMT is answered, even if that’s a few hours later (its not normally that long!)
Luckily our community and especially the ‘regulars’ have bought into this and its really a case of everyone helping/advising each other – that’s what builds the community.
Brilliant improvement in rank this season, well done! Have you set a target for next season yet?
Thank you Kralin & cookie.
Thought of 10k as a reasonable target for next season!