As part of FISO’s special series of weekly articles on FanTeam, Europe’s biggest daily fantasy football provider, we will actually be entering the team we write about each week into the game. Our article will focus on an Early Entry for their Fantasy Premier League tournament held each week in order to help you identify game rules, tactics and the most promising players per gameweek, so you can win some of that large prize money.
Our FISO team below will be entered into both this week’s £18 entry (£45,000 prize pool) and the £1.80 entry (£9,000 prize pool) Weekly Monster. The winner takes home a cool £4,500 (or £900 for the £1.80 entry lower stakes game) and brings excitement to the next 4 days of Premier League action. Join the discussion on FISO’s FanTeam forum.
Before moving onto our team selection, we want to highlight a couple of FanTeam rules that they apply to their Weekly Monster competition and that represent some of the major differences when comparing the game to the FPL. Do though check out the Predicted Line-Ups for the Premier League clubs as well as the latest injury news (click on ‘Team’ to sort per club rather than the default ‘date’) before finalising your picks.
Number one is that FanTeam have a rule called the ‘safety net’. The safety net comes into play when a selected player does not start in the Weekly Monster, because the game will then automatically replace this player with the next lowest-priced player from the same position (GK, DEF, MID, FOR) in the same team. This is regardless of whether or not your selected player does take to the field later in the game. This rule helps people who have entered a team into the Weekly Monster not to worry too much about whether their selected players will start or not, particularly if they know there are cheaper players for that same club in that same position who should start instead.
Number two is that FanTeam also have a ‘stacking penalty’ for the Weekly Monster, which penalises teams that have selected more than one defenders/goalkeeper from the same club. The stacking penalty comes into play when you pick more than one defensive player (defenders or goalkeepers) from a particular club and this club records a clean sheet. The points awarded for this clean sheet will decrease by 1 point for each additional defensive player from the same club that you have selected. The stacking penalty has a maximum of minus 3 points. This rule helps stop multi-entrants from gaining an advantage by submitting block defence teams. A reasonable tactic can be to select two players from two different clubs for your Goalie and 3 Defenders, which would see you incur just 2 single-point deductions if you nail both clean sheets correctly.
Gameweek 33 £50K Weekly Monster matches
Our team entered in the Weekly Monster in gameweek 33
The Liverpool & Leicester attack are not surprisingly the highest priced players in GW33 which for a change starts on Friday night. Their matches, against Newcastle (15th with only 1 loss in the last 5) and Crystal Palace (13th with 2 losses in the last 5) respectively, are expected to go the way of the two clubs chasing a Champions League place for next season with Liverpool in 7th (with 3 wins and a draw in their last 4) and Leicester in 3rd (lost their last 2 matches but play WBA tonight and have a FA Cup Final next month). Salah (c) should be fresh after only 20 minutes against Leeds in their last match on Monday and TAA is back among the goals and assists recently at last. Iheanacho‘s form is hard to ignore and has combined well with Vardy (vc) in a new style 2 pronged Leicester attack.
Having spent a large proportion of our budget on 4 players from Liverpool and Leicester our next 3 are taken from mid-priced Wolves (12th having won their last 2 matches) who play Burnley (17th having lost their last 3 matches and are 1 place and 6 points away from a relegation spot). Traore has shown more of his potential with a goal and assist in his last 2 matches. Saiss and Semedo are the top priced Wolves defenders and a clean sheet against Burnley would be their 3rd successive shut-out.
Our 3 budget fillers come from the already relegated Sheffield United who have lost their last 5 matches and sit at the bottom of the EPL on a miserly 14 points. They play Brighton in 16th who have 2 wins and 2 draws in their last 5 to now sit 7 points away from the relegation zone. Their last 2 matches though have been 0-0 draws so our hope is that the Sheffield United defence including Goalkeeper Ramsdale and full-back Baldock, along with attacking midfielder Osborn can again prevent Brighton from scoring and maybe sneak a win in their first match since relegation was confirmed.
That leaves one spot and we’ve saved that for Mason Greenwood who has rediscovered his scoring touch and confidence. With Man United (2nd) playing Leeds (10th) there is a decent chance of a few goals.
