Champions League Fantasy Football

Group A Bayern have locked up Group A, and after a hard fought battle with RB Leipzig at the weekend, are expected to rotate essentially the whole side again, as they did in MD5's tie with Atletico. With a handful of players sidelined (including Kimmich, Martinez, Tolisso, Davies, Hernandez, and possibly Boateng), there will likely be a need for a couple of starters to play here, which will mean Bayern remain a source of solid fantasy value. Despite playing at the weekend, Sane looks like a good bet here, having only notched four starts this season. Gnabry was benched at the weekend so could feature here, though as a regular starter this could be considered a good opportunity to give him some rest. With Hernandez and probably Boateng missing, both Alaba and Sule could end up playing here without too many rotation options available. Lomomotiv will presumably field as strong of a side as they can, in a quest for the Europa League spot, although they do have some personnel issues wit...

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...

[Part 2 focusing on low cost defenders can be found here ] As we discussed in the defender value post, I would guess the majority of managers reading this are aware of the UCL scoring wrinkle around "balls recovered" and how it can be the great equalizer in this game. However, while many of us know the names likely to contribute in the attacking third, we don't necessarily have an instinctive feel for who might do well in this relatively new category, so we'll first dig into some of that data, before getting into specific picks below. First, a caveat. While the UCL site does show last season's balls recovered numbers, I cannot see a definition nor source for this data. Thiago Silva, for example, is shown to have recovered 69 balls in the Champions League last season but per FBRef he notched 99 "loose balls recovered". Similarly, Leipzig's Klosterman shows 116 at FBRef but only 79 at the UCL Fantasy site. Now the good news is that the two stats appe...

It goes without saying that the ability to find defenders who can contribute at both ends of the pitch is a worthy goal of any fantasy manager. The likes of Alexander-Arnold and Robertson have in the past become close to essential players to own in FPL thanks to their countless goals and assists at Liverpool ( sometimes even to each other ) while the two highest owned defenders at the time of writing in UCL are Alphonso Davies (42%) and Sergio Ramos (39%). Consider that no other Real Madrid defender has over 6% ownership and only the equally attacking Kimmich can top that mark at Bayern. This theory is typically sound, but there are a couple of things to consider before investing too heavily in your defense solely to chase goals or assists.  First, even the best defenders don't have that many attacking returns and there are obviously comparatively few Champions League games, which makes variance more impactful. For example, per Opta data, the aforementioned Alexander-Arnold had an ...