Fantasy World Cup - how much of it is 'LUCK'?

 

Before this World Cup tournament, and this summer Fantasy game, got under way, someone asked on one of the Facebook Fantasy forums if people thought there would be more or less 'skill' involved in the World Cup Fantasy game than there is in our usual Fantasy Premier League. I was inclined to be optimistic that there might be just a little bit more scope for 'skill' in this. But I have come to think that that was foolish of me.

I had thought the large number of available players, and the relative lack of knowledge about them for most Fantasy managers, might offer some scope for rewarding those who took the trouble to do a bit more research to try to identify the most promising options among the ranks of smaller countries and lesser-known players. But....NO, the scoring has been utterly dominated by the handful of top players (Messi, Mbappé, Vini, Bellingham, Haaland, Dembélé, Kane...); being quick to identify the best 'unknowns' has really been of very little advantage.

I had thought that the extra points available as a 'Scouting Bonus' for low-owned players who produced a decent match contribution might also offer an opportunity for managers who were better informed about some of the less well-known teams to pick up a small earned advantage here or there. That worked quite well for me in last summer's Club World Cup; but there were fewer promising players to sift through in that (some teams were so weak that they could be completely discounted from consideration; and few teams were rotating much outside of a 'best eleven'...); also, it seemed to be much easier to find information on how they'd performed over the previous season; and that information was highly relevant, as they were there playing for their domestic clubs rather than their countries, and so could demonstrate established form over a long run of consecutive games - not a luxury we ever have with international teams. So,... NO, the ridiculous FIFA website UI made it virtually impossible to find out which players were even eligible on their ownership level; and just about none of the ones who were actually made enough of a contribution to earn the extra points - so, that was a complete bust as well.

I had thought that the large number of 'premium' players in the competition might put a lot of pressure on the budget, and require tougher, shrewder choices from us in filling out our squads. But in fact, since the budget cap in this game is fairly generous, and is increased for the knockout rounds, and since player prices remain fixed throughout, and no player is priced above 10 million pounds (dollars/euros? I suppose no actual denomination is ever specified...), it's actually not been very difficult at all to afford pretty much everyone we most covet. There might have been some difficult choices to make in attack, with Kane looking in good form in a tournament for once, and Havertz and Olarzabal both looking promising possibilities at the start of the competition. But with Messi being classified as a forward, and he, Mbappé, and Haaland all being in scintillating goalscoring form, it was soon evident that even Kane didn't quite make the cut, and that those three were the essential picks up-front for everyone.

The large number of 'booster' chips on offer in this game might also seem to have offered the possibility of some exercise of 'skill' in deciding how best to use them. But the 'Qualification Bonus' was essentially a money-for-nothing chip that almost anyone could get nearly maximum value from by playing it sensibly in the 'Round of 32'. The 'Wildcard' is simply to be held in reserve as a get-out-of-jail-free card to deal with a possible multiple-eliminations disaster, but might not be needed at all. And the 'Clean Sheet Bonus' - kept back as a 'surprise', and not even explained until the end of the group phase - turned out to be the most stupidly random chip imaginable: extra points for players who concede exactly 1 goal (which is simply impossible to anticipate: you play it whenever you haven't got a more pressing reason to use another chip, and you might make 20 points off it or - more likely - 0 points!!). The other two, more conventional bonus chips. 'Maximum Captain' and '12th Man' might provide some reward for shrewd deployment; but the actual return on them is highly variable - and, just as with the dratted 'Triple Captain' chip in FPL, there is a very strong chance of you making next-to-nothing from them.

The ability to make full use of our bench via 'manual substitutions' during the course of the MatchDay should also represent some scope for the application of 'skill' - but, in practice, very little. The fairly elementary procedure of stacking all the players who play their games latest in the MatchDay on your bench, and then bringing them in to replace players who've already played and failed to return decent points - well, that's easily mastered by absolutely everyone, and provides no useful differentiation between the vast majority of participating managers.

Yes, there are more decisions to be made in a short period of time in this Fantasy game. But, in my more despairing moments, I am inclined to think that every decision you make is just a further chance for you to be unlucky. 

And there is less time - none at all, really!! - to recover from a bad round in this competition. A few terrible Gameweeks don't completely ruin your chances in a competition that stretches over 38 instalments. But in one that only has 8 rounds (and the last 2 of these barely count, since the last few games of a tournament tend to be quite low-scoring; and with so few options left in the available player pool, there's very little scope for differentiation in squads any more), one or two poor MatchDays can put you right out of contention for a high finish. (Just about all of the front-runners this year have been coasting along on the advantage they gained from extraordinarily lucky performances right at the start of the tournament, when they somehow managed to pull in 130, 140, 150 points from MD1 and/or MD2.)

It hasn't helped, either, that just about all the best players have been in such superb form that they have eclipsed the value that might have been offered by anyone else. This has been a rare case where there really is an unarguable 'template' for a large part of your team: it has been inescapable to have Mbappé, Messi, and Haaland, and Vini and Bellingham, and only when you get down into the middle part of the squad have you started encountering more challenging conundrums as to whether to go for Yamal or Olmo or Dembélé or Olise or Saibari or Manzambi or Macallister or Pulisic, etc.

The one small area where 'skill' might yet prove to have made a bit of a difference is in spreading risk to avoid massive damage from unexpected eliminations. Many managers seem to have been rashly loading up on 5 or 6 players from their favourite teams - which could have left them perhaps needing to spend a few 'hits' to restore a full-strength squad if that team were knocked out. But, as it happens, all four of the 'favourites' came through their quarter-finals OK, so probably almost no-one has been hit by this problem; and it really shouldn't be a concern in the semi-finals (as you don't need a bench for the Final, and can thus afford to lose up to 9 or 10 players).

I was observing to someone the other day that... people will always disagree on exactly how much 'skill' there is at play in our Fantasy Football games. To some people it might feel like a lot; but to others only a very little. But the unfortunate truth is that however much scope for the operation of 'skill' in the game there may be, it ultimately makes almost no difference. There is not much of a spread in skill-level across the reasonably competent and engaged Fantasy managers; the only thing that makes a difference in their outcomes is.... LUCK.