Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Fantasy Football

I joined a Fantasy Football league this year, complete with transfers, bidding, etc... 14 members were each given £75 million to bid on and buy 16 players in several rounds of blind auctions. I bid quite high in my first round and secured 13 players, probably the most of anyone in the league, but was left with only £5 million for the remaining three. Some astute bidding secured me two more in the second round, and I'm left with £500,000 for one player in the third round. My team so far:

GK - Tim Howard, Everton - 10m
DF - Jose Bosingwa, Chelsea - free (in the second round, even) 
DF - Sol Campbell, Portsmouth - free
DF - Sylvain Distin, Portsmouth - 8m
DF - Lucas Neill, West Ham - free
MF - Ryan Babel, Liverpool - 4.5m
MF - Francesco Fabregas, Arsenal - 15m
MF - Luka Modric, Tottenham - 6m
MF - Martin Petrov, Man. City - free
MF - Theo Walcott, Arsenal - 7m
MF - SWP, Chelsea - free
FW - Gabriel Agbonlahor, Aston Villa - 14m
FW - Dean Ashton, West Ham - 10m
FW - Darren Bent, Tottenham - free
FW - Michael Owen, Newcastle - free

So, it's easy to see that I got many on free transfers, meaning no one bid on them that round, allowing me to overspend on those I really wanted. And I did overspend. No one else bid for a few players I spent a good amount on. That's what happens in a blind auction, I guess. I was also lucky to get a few players that had equal bids; the system makes a random choice. 

Edit: I finished my team off with a .5m bid for Kevin Kilbane. Not a superstar by any stretch, but a solid defender, albeit on a team that will struggle.

Bent's been hitting the net in the pre-season, and Berbatov is off to ManU, so he should get playing time. Owen will be my sub, I can't see him hitting too many this season. 

1 comment:

paul said...

Beware the fantasy sports league. I became so obsessive in managing my fantasy baseball team, discussing trades and working on formulas to predict future performance that I lost track of much of the rest of the world.
Did develop pretty good database skills, though.