Champions League Fantasy Football

With three weeks in the books, the lessons from team's lineups are mainly that anything can happen and few, if any, players can really be totally relied upon to start. COVID-19 continues to cause havoc in the footballing world, with Ajax looking like they would be reduced to a youth team , but then fielding a pretty strong side after senior players were able to be added late in the day, while Lazio's rollercoaster situation continues to play out. Putting aside the obvious real world issues here, for our purposes I think the lesson is that your bench becomes even more important than usual (and it's already more important in UCL due to the ability to sub players in).  In this week's lineup lessons then I am therefore going to focus on mid-range options who have emerged as reliable starters with a reasonable amount of upside. I am also focusing on midfielders and forwards as there seems to be an abundance of options in each of the price brackets at the back, and the key ...

In FPL, generally the optimum strategy for deploying your wildcard is to exercise patience, not get drawn into a panic-move in GW3 and play the card when you can most value because of a depleted squad or to take advantage of a double gameweek. In UCL though, the opportunities to deploy the chip are obviously fewer in number, particularly when you consider that you also  essentially get a wildcard between the group and knockout stages. With so many free transfers available during the knockout phase, combined with the reduced number of teams and lower risk of rotation (teams are typically going all out in knock out games), there's also perhaps a diminished value in using the wildcard in those weeks too, assuming you have structured your team strategically. This has led me in past seasons to conclude that the best use of the wildcard is during the group phase. With that in mind, I think we're left with two obvious choices: Save the wildcard for MD6 when a number of teams will have...