FanDuel soccer has arrived! FanDuel introduced Premier League soccer as an offering a few weeks ago and I still haven’t gotten around to introducing it to you guys, so I wanted to take some time this week to introduce the game and provide some tips. Let’s start with the big question – what is daily fantasy soccer?
I wrote a pretty in depth article on what Daily Fantasy Soccer is last season, and you can take a look here:
http://www.nbcsports.com/edge/articles/bpl/55374/367/what-is-daily-fantasy-soccer
To summarize, it’s a fantasy sport that you can play with real money against others, where your roster changes every week. One of the most important aspects before starting is to get accustomed to the scoring, so I’ll take a few minutes here describing that:
FanDuel Scoring
So, looking at this, where do we focus? Let’s start at Shots on Goal. Shots on goal are quite over-emphasized in this format compared to most other formats we are familiar with. Five points for a shot on goal gives forwards quite a bit of upside, and makes it worth it for spending up on forwards in GPPs. Ways to try and predict shots on goal would be to look at chances a player or team have at scoring goals, and to look at how many shots opposing teams concede.
The leaders in shots on goal this season:
Ibrahimovic | 21 |
Aguero | 19 |
Costa | 18 |
Walcott | 17 |
Coutinho | 16 |
Hazard | 16 |
Lukaku | 16 |
Sigurdsson | 15 |
Firmino | 15 |
Sanchez | 14 |
Notice a few that stand out, such as Walcott and Sigurdsson. These guys are generally a bit cheaper than the rest, but provide quite an upside.
Other stats that are good for top heavy tournaments are goals, assists, and chances created. All of those are fairly unpredictable stats that can give your players a monster score on any given week. Targeting weak defenses is an obvious way to increase your chances of goals and assists, but an underrated aspect is taking players playing at home, which is a good boost to performance across all stats. Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about 50/50 leagues now.
50/50 leagues (cash games) are a more reliable way to play every week, and they are leagues in which you should target a high floor rather than a high ceiling. On FanDuel, ways to target a high floor are to chase reliable week-to-week stats, such as clearances, blocked shots, interceptions, fouls drawn, and tackles. Ideally, you want to target players that also excel in some of the attacking stats we discussed above, but these are great ways to get a nice floor out of players.
Players who play in the middle of the field are sometimes a lot more active in defensive stats, and should be considered in 50/50s. Take for example Philippe Coutinho, who averages 32.8 FanDuel points per game. He is involved in a ton of ways, including shots, goals, assists, chances created, interceptions, fouls drawn, passes, tackles, etc, and that gives him a great floor of around 20 points on almost any given weekend. In cash games, he is a stable on any week, as opposed to someone like Sergio Aguero, who is a fantastic pick in top heavy tournaments but doesn’t make a ton of sense on a week-to-week basis as he has a low floor.
Let’s now look at the goalkeeper scoring:
FanDuel Goalkeeper Scoring
Although a clean sheet is 10 points, it’s fairly difficult to predict clean sheets. So what should we do? Chase saves. Goalkeepers who face a lot of shots in a given week generally have a lot of saves, even if they concede a few goals. With saves being three points and a goal allowed is just negative one, this makes for a good fantasy play. You’ll notice underdog goalkeepers are priced higher, and that’s not surprising.
Hope this was a good introduction to FanDuel, I’ll be back next week with more in depth analysis!
