English Premier League Fantasy Football: July Preview

I'm delighted to open my account for Bleacher's by reporting that the official version of the EPL fantasy league for the 2009/10 season is now up and running at http://fantasy.premierleague.com/.

Here's an early pre-season view of how to pick your team.

First of all, know all the rules of the game. I'm not saying this is the greatest article ever, but even if it is there's probably not much point in reading it if you don't know the rules. And I'm not going to explain them.

That said, I shall note a few basics. In this version of fantasy football you get penalised for changing your squad by more than one player a week, and you'll miss out on points if you aren't able to field a full team.

Even the lowest-scoring players tend to average 2+ points/game (provided they're on the pitch for at least 60 minutes), and with a little background analysis you should be able to ensure that everyone in your squad can be expected to average at least 3.

At the upper end of the scale, the most you can reasonably hope for from a player is about 7 points/game.

So you should look to have a squad of 15 active players, of which each week you'll play the best 11 (subject to restrictions on formation).

Goalkeepers can score 7 pts/game, but only if they keep a succession of clean sheets week in week out. In practice, a goalie in one of the Big 4 will score a bit less than 5 pts/game and set you back 6.5m. But a goalie in a lower-ranked team will probably still average close to 4 pts/game, as long as he's playing regularly, and will cost only 4.0m.

So buy a pair of cheap goalies, rotate them to avoid difficult fixtures, and you'll still have 92.0m left for the rest of your squad.

Defenders will generally score you between 3 and 5 pts/game. And a top defender will cost up to 8m. Generally, though, you'll be best off buying 5.0m defenders who'll score close to 4 pts/game—it's worth pay extra for these rather than buying 4.0m ones who'll probably score no more than three.

It's not worth spending more than 5.0m unless a player classed as a defender turns out to be a free-scoring midfielder in a team which keeps a lot of clean sheets. Yuri Zhirkov (7.5m), for example, may turn out to be a 6 pts/game player. There again, he may not make the starting line-up. So reckon on spending only 25.0m on your 5 defenders, leaving 67.0m.

Forwards (I'll leave the midfield till last) are much the same story: 3-5 pts/game. But whilst a top defender costs 8m, a top striker costs 11+m. So you'll probably do better to save your cash and get all your strikers from lower-ranked teams for say 6.0m each. You can't expect them to score more than 3 pts/game, but you may get lucky.

Midfielders should be where most of your points come from, especially if the advised stinginess in the other departments has left you 49.0m to blow on them. The very top midfielders cost about 12m each and score close to 7 pts/game on average. Buy three of these (Gerrard, Lampard and probably Arshavin), rotate the captaincy around them to take advantage of easy fixtures, and together they could be contributing nearly half your points. That still leaves 13m for your last two midfielders, who'll be more like 4 pts/game men.

So, in round numbers, you'll have got a squad of 15 players including 3 midfield superstars, 3 3pts/game strikers and 9 4pts/game other players. As the strikeforce is relatively weak you'll tend to do best playing in 4-5-1 or 5-4-1 formation, but that also depends on the fixtures.

Adding it up, your 3 superstars should bring in 25+ points a week while the rest should bring in about 31 (3 from the striker and 7x4 from the others). And 56 pts/week amounts to 2100+ points for the season, which I think most of us would be pleased with.