Champions League Fantasy Football

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...

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...