Champions League Fantasy Football

Trying to take away too  much information from one week of data is clearly risky, yet with only six matchdays to work with, it's essential in the Champions League game to adjust quickly.  If you take Timo Werner this season at Chelsea as an example, it is fairly clear to everyone he's a good player yet after four games he had done very little in terms of outcome, and even his underlying numbers were underwhelming. Yet, those who were patient in FPL were then rewarded with a huge game in his fifth league appearance.  In the Champions League though, there is no time for such patience and you need to move quickly to maximize your squad. With the ability to sub-in players during the week, having at least a couple of viable subs is essential and carrying dead weight just isn't as feasible as it is in FPL. On the positive side though, there are 32 teams worth of talent to choose from, and all but a handful offer a number of viable options to choose from.  This isn't to say...

We touched on the elite defensive options in part one , along with some background info on how to think about defender value in the UCL game. For ease of viewing I am going to re-post the two viz's here, namely the balls recovered data, and the team goals conceded projections from 538. If you read part one, these will be familiar. Budget (4.0m-4.5m) There seems to be an unequivocal winner here in Jules Kounde (4.0m) , who looks like a lock in a very good Sevilla defense (ranked third above) and even posted solid balls recovered numbers last season which have improved further in the first handful of games this season. Unfortunately 30% of managers have also unearthed this gem which really dampens the appeal, but it's probably too cute to not pick him just because he's popular given how solid this pick is. The only other potentially viable 4.0m defender I can see is Jerome Onguene (4.0m) at Salzburg, though he doesn't appear to be completely locke...