I know no one likes to give away their secrets but thought it might be a good idea to have a thread to discuss tactics people like to use, or any ideas that they have about how to build a good team or pick up the bargain players.

Recently I've been thinking that its best to have defenders and midfielders from the same team e.g. a team with Silva, Bale and Dempsey in midfield should have Kompany, Kaboul and Hangeland in defence. Obviously this wont always be possible but I've been watching Man city games and i dont have any City defenders but have Silva in midfield and i have to hope that City concede (meaning i lose out on 2 points for Silva) because I know other people will benefit more because they have City defenders. But if I had a City defender I'd gain on both sides when they do well.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this, is it necessary to get to the top? or any thing else ppl have been considering? would be good to get a brainstorming thread going

Have a look at the top 100 teams.

I don't think what you're saying is a bad idea, but don't think it's necessary.

Without wanting to overly simplify it, but you need the highest scorers in their position (with an eye on value for money). So it could be Hangeland ticks that box, but I wouldnt pick him solely because I also wanted Dempsey.

The counter argument to yours is that City could concede 2, but win 4-2 and Silva or Yaya is star man goal scorer.

I normally see in July who someone like rob45, tomuk rates highly and remove them from my short list

Still used to like the days of shearer, van nistlerooy and Henry and just have a cheap defence

All about building teams for me.

With a reasonable amount of research and football knowledge everybody can pick a decent team. But all sorts of factors will play their part in making it extremely unlikely for that teams to finish Top 10 out of 150,000 premium entries.

Need to cover bases. Not as easy as it sounds, even with 20,000 teams

As long as you don't pick ridiculous players like Louis Saha, Damien Duff or David Wheater then you should be fine. The rest is luck, sometimes you can have the foresight to make a good transfer choice but most of the time it is pretty hard to know how long a player will be in-form before you need to ditch him for another player who stays in form or comes into form.

Plus to really have a chance you need to buy a lot of teams and mix them up a bit and at least one of them should do well. I have never really done that well in the seasonal although I did make the top 500 stage a few years back. I am a WDT Mini League king.

My WDT win this season was complete and utter luck really, although it was designed to win a WDT as it had my usual block defence. A city block which got a clean sheet with Lampard and Dempsey who both got hat tricks that weekend, and starred Agbonlahor who only scored 1 goal I think.

Total and utter luck, I didn't know I had won as I was paying no interest to the game, only found out a month later via email. But I guess not many ppl do block defences so that can be a huge advantage some weekends, so there is some thought to it although u don't need much of a brain to work out that block defences are advantageous.

Have you abandoned your strategy of picking £1-2m players then padding out your team with £8m men

the europa league seems to have a big say nowadays esp with defenders getting easy clean sheet points in the group stage

Yeah I think with the early transfer window, putting in a semi block of defenders from Fulham/Stoke teams in europa is a good way to go, then easing them out as the games get fewer and harder. Of course it can always backfire if the get smashed in the PL.

Do people think its a gd idea to always try and have a semi block (2-3 defenders/goalie) from one team at each window dependent on which teams you think will keep the most cleansheets? or would you just as happily have a back 5 from 5 different teams?

I think it still comes down to VFM; but yes preferably a pair or trio is no bad thing.

Say at the start of this season Schwarzer and Hangeland as a pair appealed. But don't just throw Riise in just to make it a trio.

thats very true..with stoke huth and shawcross tick along nicely for there value but i wouldnt go off chasing higgingbottom-wilson etc