Fantasy football tactics for a short knockout tournament (in a nutshell)

I've already touched slightly on the Fantasy tactics for knockout tournaments, in relation to the inaugural FIFA Club World Cup currently going on, notably in this post last week, But I thought I'd take a moment to sketch out the basics in a little more detail now.

The main points to watch out for are:

1) Not quite the game you're used to

Be aware of the rule differences (particularly in points allocations!) from Fantasy Premier League, or any other Fantasy football games you play more regularly. Small differences in the points weightings for different positions can have quite a big impact on the players you choose for certain positions, or the optimum formation you might go with for different sets of fixtures.

2)  The group phase lottery

In the group stage, be aware of the wide variation in fixture difficulty from one batch of matches to the next, and of the likelihood of heavy rotation in squads. It is very, very difficult to plan effectively for the short group stage of tournaments like this - usually only three matches - because: a) You're largely playing blind on MatchDay 1, having very little idea of the likely form, fitness, or selections even at the teams you're most familiar with; and it's inevitable in a bigger tournament that there will be at least a few teams about whom you know next-to-nothing,... some of whom might turn out to be better than you expect.  b) There are probably a few very weak teams who offer the prospect of big points for almost any opponent; but you might not be quite sure who they are until after MatchDay 1; and, in any event, you don't have enough Free Transfers to keep optimising your team against these weaker competitors from one MatchDay to the next. Moreover, stronger teams may be tempted to rest some of their best players against opponents like this, even if qualification is not yet completely settled. c) There will usually be some 'dead rubbers' on MatchDay 3, where teams have little or nothing to play for (other than pride!), and may field a weakened lineup or be lacking in motivation. d) It is quite common for top players recovering from an injury to be brought to a tournament in the hope that they will be able to participate in the later stages. Even if they are 'fully fit', concerns about fatigue after the domestic season may lead to them getting rested in the earlier games. Just because a big name is included in the squad, it doesn't guarantee he's going to appear - much, or sometimes at all - in the group games.

3)  'Second chances'!!

Make the most of the 'manual substitutions' feature! Being able to swap out disappointing players for ones who have yet to play (and in some games, like the current Club World Cup Fantasy, also to have a second chance at picking the recipient of your captain's bonus) can be enormously valuable. So, you should always have not just a full bench, but a strong one; and you need to make sure that the players you initially leave on the bench are playing as late as possible in the MatchDay, so that you will have the maximum opportunity to to review the performance of your players playing on earlier days and consider switching them out. (Remember, there's a lot of flexibility as to formations; so, you're not restricted to swapping a forward for a forward, etc.; you can usually sub out a player from any position [except goalkeeper, of course] for one of any other position.)

4)  Emptying the bench cautiously, later on

However, in later rounds, you might consider gradually emptying your bench. As the games in each round become fewer (and less far apart; and, often, much more closely contested - meaning there might be low points for all attacking players, and perhaps scarcely any for keepers and defenders), the value of the manual substitutions is gradually diminished. In the Final, manual substitutions are no longer posssible, and the remaining value of your bench in being able to replace any unexpected non-starters by automatic substitutions (as in the regular Fantasy Premier League game) might be fairly minimal; so, you can consider having at least one or two gaps on the bench for that last game, perhaps even leaving it completely empty. For the 'Round of 16' - and sometimes, perhaps, for the Quarter-Finals too - with multiple games spread across multiple days, it is still worth trying to keep a full and strong bench; but after that, you can hang on to one or two eliminated players - ideally a cheap goalkeeper or defender - as a 'budget enabler' to help you spend a bit more on the rest of your squad. However, leaving gaps in the squad puts you more at risk of needing to use large numbers of extra transfers to rebuild the squad if some of your players are unexpectedly eliminated from the competition (see next point).

5)  Elimination roulette

In the knockout phase, you need to take care to spread risk by never taking too many players from one club. You can't afford to leave yourself short for the subsequent round by landing yourself with a lot of eliminated players. (The game tempts you toward self-destruction by usually allowing you to take far more players from one team than you should sensibly want. And the larger number of transfers than we're used to in extended league format competitions encourages the dangerous hope that we might get away with it, that one wrong guess about a result won't leave us having to take 'hits' for additional transfers. But, oh yes, it can; it very often does.)  As a general rule of thumb, I'd say - try to take no more than 2 players per team in the 'Round of 16', 3 players per team in the Quarter-Finals, and 4 players per team in the Semi-Finals. (Of course, this may vary, depending on whether there are any fixtures in the round that you feel you can trust as absolute gimmes [always a bit of a gamble!], whether you're making do with any empty spaces on your bench, and how many Free Transfers you're allowed for the next round. Also, of course, in the nations' World Cup, there's a Third Place Play-Off game, so you don't necessarily lose anyone from the semi-finals [although you'd rather have as many players in the Final as possible, because it will be a more competitive match, and isn't likely to omit any of the teams' top players].)  And you need to be mindful that, if you max out your number of Free Transfers replacing eliminated players, you may be further screwed by injuries or suspensions; and you have absolutely no wiggle-room for additional elective transfers to swap out players who've shown disappointing form. [I added a footnote to this point a little later.]

6)  Heightened risk-awareness

Remember that this additional hazard of potentially losing players to elimination after each knockout round means that you also have to be extremely careful with other players who present any risk of not playing - those who are an injury doubt, or are threatened with possible rotation, or could be likely to pick up a suspension. In the knockout rounds, you want to try to pick not only players who will do well in this round, but are also virtually certain to play in the next round as well (and, ideally, in the one after that too!).

7)  Chip strategy

The types of 'chips' available vary from tournament to tournament, so you need to be careful to assess what each one may be worth.

There's almost invariably a Wildcard - an 'unlimited transfers' rebuild option, just like we have in FPL. Since you're always allowed a full rebuild anyway after the group phase, the choice on this one is a simple binary: use it to optimise your team for MatchDay 2 (when there are usually a lot of unbalanced match-ups that could produce high points scores, and you should have a better idea of everyone's form and fitness after the first batch of games,.... and you may have found that a lot f your inital picks are not looking too good, not just for MD2 but in general), OR save it for the quarters or semis, as insurance against getting hit hard by eliminations (and injuries and suspensions) in one of those key rounds.

There's sometimes an additional rebuild chip. If it's a Free Hit style of rebuild, reverting to your previous squad after one MatchDay, it's better used in MD2 - as it's very dangerous to use a chip like that in the knockout rounds, unless you're very, very confident in how well you've done in the last round,... that all of your players are going to get through the next round as well (but if you think that, why would use a Free Hit to replace a bunch of them??). Such a chip often boasts the additional advantage of an unlimited budget, but I generally find that to be of little or no practical use as FIFA and UEFA games rarely put any serious pressure on your budget. If it's a simple Wildcard type of chip, it's better to save it for the later rounds, where you might have been badly hit by eliminations in the previous round.

Because of the 'manual substitutions' facility usually available in these games, there's no Bench Boost option. 'Bonus Chips' are typically a 'Maximum Captain', where your captaincy bonus points are automatically ascribed to your highest-returning player (I actually rather prefer this to FPL's Triple Captain), and/or an 'Extra Man', where you can get points from an additional player (outside of your squad, and your budget limit - the purest Fantasy indulgence: "If I could have the points of one player I couldn't afford to fit in my squad, who would it be.... and which Round would that be in??").

'Bonus chips' are almost always of most value in the 'Round of 16' and the 'Quarter-Finals', because there are more games being played, and at least one or two of them should usually have a fairly obvious winner and the prospect of some good points for leading players. There may be a case, depending on form and fixtures, for trying one in the group phase occasionally; but, for me, there is usually too much uncertainty early in the competition. It's probably more valuable to optimise your entire squad for favourable fixtures in MD2 (which will probably require a Wildcard, and thus preclude you from playing a bonus chip); while in MD3 there's too much risk of top players being rested, even if qualifcation is not yet fully assured. And in the later rounds of the competition, games become increasingly cagey, and often the outcomes are impossible to predict with any confidence; we tend to get fewer goals, but also few or no clean sheets - so, no-one earns that many Fantasy points any more (at least, not in any kind of predictable way!).

The inaugural Club World Cup fantasy game also has a novel bonus chip called the 'Qualification Booster' (which, again, I rather like - and hope to see reappear in World Cup Fantasy next summer...): in a knockout round, we get 2 extra points for every player who progresses to the next match - a reward for being able to guess team results correctly. That's almost certain to be best used in the 'Round of 16', because matches become closer and outcomes more unforeseen the further we go into a tournament: even if the matches in the first knockout round seem hard to call, it's bound to become harder still in the subsequent rounds.

Sorry, this ended up being rather longer than I'd intended. But I think it is just about everything you could possibly need to know about Fantasy games for knockout tournaments. I hope some folks will find it useful. (Now a bit late for the 2025 Club World Cup, of course, but there will be other tournaments of similar format soon enough....)

Definitions, explanations?

It is a source of constant frustration to me that Fantasy Football games - and the companies collating football statistics in general - never seem to offer any attempt at defining the terms they use to designate various aspects of performance. 

And, heck, even carefully framed definitions would not be enough. There is always scope for some ambiguity, for some borderline cases which defy convenient classification within one description rather than another. Ideally - as with exam marking schemes and tax regulations - you need not just the basic rule, but amplified interpretation guidelines, and detailed discussion of some illustrative example cases. I fear there's no chance of ever getting anything like that from FPL or Opta.  [And while we're dreaming of a better world, fuller 'implementation guidelines' for our referees from the FA and PGMOL would be helpful too!]

This omission is particularly galling in the current Fantasy Club World Cup game, where, instead of awarding general 'bonus points' based on a range of indicators of overall player performance, we are supposed to be getting extra points for certain individual game actions. But it is very unclear how or even if this is actually working, as the game site doesn't provide any tabulated player statistics [one of the most galling of its many, many shortcomings], and it's a bit of a rigmarole even to root out MatchDay figures for players in your current squad; and when you do find them, there's no justification given for them.

Far fewer points seem to be being awarded under these additional categories than we would have reasonably expected before the tournament. Often, it's been a struggle to find any such points being awarded in a MatchDay.

Are goalkeepers somehow making hardly any saves in this tournament? Are forwards not having any shots on target? Are midfielders not completing any tackles, or creating any chances??

That doesn't accord with the viewer's subjective experience - that it has been a high-quality tournament, with lots of excellent attacking play, and, in most games, quite a large number of scoring chances for both sides.

We must conclude that either the game is sometimes omitting to apply the appropriate points for these game actions, or the stats provider is somehow egregiously miscounting/misrecording them, or.... they're using extremely narrow definitions which exclude the majority of game actions that most people would expect to be eligible for counting under a commonsense view.

Chances created - does that mean only 'missed chances' and exclude actual goals?! If it encompasses 'missed chances', does that include instances where the attacker was put in a good position for an attempt on goal, but shanked his shot, or miscontrolled the ball initially, or hesitated for a moment before shooting and so allowed defenders to recover and get a block in, or was dispossessed just as he was pulling the trigger by a heroic last-ditch challenge? Or does it include only actual goals? (But if so, how is that different from the more familiar term 'assists'? Why not just use that instead??) I imagine there's a lot of definitional overlap here with what constitutes a 'shot on target' (see next point, below), so probably also includes at least efforts that required saves to be made by the keeper. Does it include players who 'make a chance' for themselves by - carrying the ball forward a long distance, or jinking past a couple of defenders to break into the box, or cutting inside and racing away from a marker to find room for a shot? Common sense would say 'YES' - but heaven knows what FIFA and their Fantasy game has decided. And I'd really love if it included key contributions earlier in the move - the tackle that wins possession, or the early pass that carves open the defence - rather than just the final 'assist' (which is often just an easy lay-off, or sometimes even a miskick or an accidental deflection).

Alas, I think the definition the game is using can include none of these latter possibilities, since only a handful of players in the whole competition so far seem to have been credited with even 2 'chances created' in a match.

Shots on target - that ought to be a bit less problematic, but it's not entirely straightforward either. It's always frustrated me that stats compilers treat attempts that strike the woodwork as 'off-target' - which seems very harsh. (We really need an additional category of 'near miss' to give proper recognition to such efforts.)  Presumably headers, etc. count as well as shots with the foot; so, that's clumsy wording right there - why don't they say 'attempts on target'? And do they draw any distinction between shots blocked close to the player and further away? A player who just fires off a shot when there's a crowd of players in front of him, hoping that his effort might somehow find a path through their legs, probably doesn't deserve to have that considered a 'shot on target'; and it's difficult to see where the shot is bound anyway, when it hits another player almost immediately - on target or not? But... sometimes such hit-and-hope efforts do end up going in! Where do you draw the line on this - between a shot that never had much chance of getting past an intervening player and one where you're crediting the defender with making a fine block?  And what about 'tame' shots that are hit too softly and/or too close to the keeper to be of any real danger - do they not count? Again, occasionally a keeper will make a complete pig's-ear of such an unthreatening attempt and fumble it into his own goal,...... so, perhaps they all should count??? And, wait.... are actual goals excluded from this 'shots on target' count?? (It looks to me as if they must be.)

Saves - that last point feeds into this as well: does a keeper get credit for catching a ball that's kicked pretty much straight at him? What about if it's hit with a lot of pace, and maybe swerving in the air a little, but still straight at him? And I rather fear that 'saves' are only seen to encompass blocking, diverting or catching attempts which are bound directly for goal; but smothering the ball at an attacker's feet or pawing it away from him (especially if the keeper is the last man) or diverting a square-ball across the six-yard box heading towards an onrushing attacker, or catching a cross that's bound for an unmarked opponent at the far post - these are also 'goal-preventing actions' and really ought to receive the same credit as conventional 'saves'.

In the Euros last summer, they were awarding defenders and midfielders points for 'ball recoveries'. That seemed to work a bit better, in that it was fairly consistent and predictable which players would benefit most from this, and - in the absence again of conventional 'bonus points' - it had a significant impact on points returns and was a major driver of selection decisions. But even there, there was an opacity about what the hell the term actually meant.

Ball recoveries - presumably refers to 'turnovers of possesion' (but why didn't they just say that?); but it sounds as if it should mean only recovering possession after a ball has run loose, after it has not been clearly under either team's control for a short period; and that would be a very narrow category indeed! They probably wanted to come up with a term that suggested all forms of recovery of possession - but why didn't they just say that? Or why didn't they content themselves with using 'tackles' or 'duels' instead? Those terms aren't completely free of ambiguity, but they're more common and more straightforward than 'ball recoveries'. 'Duels', I suppose, encompass both tackles with the feet and aerial challenges - and perhaps also shouldering an opponent off the ball or using your body to stop him reaching the ball (without it being a foul!)? 'Duels' would have been a more readily understood category description to adopt than 'ball recoveries', I think. But 'duels' can be both active and passive: taking the ball off an opponent (or prevailing in a '50/50' contest) or resisting having the ball taken off you. I suppose 'ball recoveries' refer only to the former - but it wouldn't be too difficult to make that clear.

Tackles - this would appear to be the simplest and most uncontroversial category for deciding additional points allocations of this sort, and I wish they'd use this instead. But even with this, there are some potential problems. Is a tackle 'won' the moment it dispossesses an opponent, or does the tackler have to retain possession of the ball himself?? Very often a ball will break to a teammate - perhaps somewhat fortuitously - rather than being retained by the tackling player. And sometimes the ball will just run loose into space, with neither team immediately having possession of it, but a teammate of the tackler will be able to respond quickest to recover it. Are these 'tackles won' or not?

Definitions MATTER. And they're too complex to be encapsulated in a simple phrase or sentence; they require extended explanations to clarify them.

What next?

Well, hats off to Fluminense! I have made the classic mistake of dismissing - or at least undervaluing - someone's chances without sufficient information. I now realise they are one of the very few teams (the only one in the last eight) that I hadn't seen in action for at least one full game in this tournament. Watching only the extended highlights and reading multiple match reports just aren't an adequate substitute for your own 'eye test'.

The other games played out much as I expected: Real winning fairly comfortably against a lacklustre Dortmund; PSG and Chelsea also progressing, but in much tighter contests.

It was a disappointment that Al Hilal, after their sterling performance against City in the quarter-final, just didn't turn up for this one. It might have been an emotional reaction, a heavy comedown from the high of that achievement; and some of their players might have had their heads taken out of the game by the sad news about the death of Diogo Jota (his Portuguese teammates Joao Cancelo and Ruben Neves were, of course, particularly emotional; but the whole team looked very shaken during the moment of commemoration before the start of the game; poor Neves, a very close friend of Jota's, was in floods of tears). Or maybe it was just the physical toll of having had to play extra time in such suffocating heat and humidity in the previous match against City. That drain of extra time in extreme weather to get past Benfica might have been a problem for Chelsea too, who dominated comfortably for the first 20 or 25 minutes and took an early lead, but then unaccountably took their foot right off the gas to let Palmeiras walk all over them for the next two quarters of the game.

Al Hilal can also feel rather ill-served by the officals in their match. I've long had reservations about Danny Makkelie's competence for top-flight refereeing: he strikes me as one of those somewhat arrogant, prima-donna-ish refs who are perhaps insufficiently self-reflective.... and hence prone to being wildly erratic in some of their decision-making. Perhaps his unfortunate reputation for major errors in high-profile matches is just a function of the fact that he gets put in charge of so many high-profile matches; but it seems to me that with such a long record of controversy now, FIFA really ought to be downgrading him a little bit, not putting him in the firing-line quite so often (maybe they thought they were giving him a low-pressure assignment by allocating him to the tie with the two least glamorous teams remaining in the competition?). To be fair, he was perhaps a bit unlucky that, in a hard-fought game, there was an exceptionally high number of close calls: challenges where he thought there wasn't any contact, but there was; and challenges where he thought there was contact, but there wasn't - or not enough for a foul. And it probably is just an unfortunate coincidence that very nearly every one of these bad calls was to Al Hilal's detriment. 

And the three most contentious decisions - the three penalty shouts turned down - in effect rested with VAR rather than him (or at least, they should have done; maybe the off-field team felt hamstrung by the 'clear and obvious error' nonsense; although in the first instance, they did direct Makkelie to take a second look - which prejudiced him towards reversing his onfield decision when he probably shouldn't have). Admittedly the victim 'went down easily' in all three cases; but in all three cases, there definitely was contact - in the middle instance, full-on wrestling. I do not see how that 'possible holding' cannot have at least been worth a second look. For the last one, replays from behind the goal showed that the defender clearly trod on the attacker's heel - which Makkelie probably couldn't see. That kind of thing is given as a penalty 99 times out of 100; and it was certainly worth the referee having a second view of it. The victim going to ground somewhat theatrically should not disqualify him from receiving the penalty. (And with that kind of foul, it takes a moment for the pain to become noticeable and start to spread; indeed it may create a chronic soreness at the base of the Achilles, which you won't fully feel until you try to push off on that leg - and then perhaps suffer an awful moment of panic that you have have suffered a tear to that tendon. Collapsing a second or so after an impact like that is quite a natural reaction, not necessarily forced, exaggerated, 'play-acting'...) And for the first one, where Makkelie reversed himself, he came up with the - to me - bizarre justification that the incident had been just 'a normal football contact' - which smacks of him inventing rationalisations that don't necessarily accord with the rules. I am not aware of that phrase occurring in the Laws of the Game, certainly not as a defining criterion for contact fouls. The defender caught the attacker's heel with his foot, and it unbalanced him, brought him down; it doesn't have to be deliberate - it just has to be causally decisive.

If a team has three such solid appeals for a penalty in a game, they usually get at least one of them! So, in that regard, Al Hilal may feel they were robbed. But honestly, while the dubious refereeing cast a shadow over the match, it probably wasn't really decisive. Fluminense were much the better team on the day, and well worthy of the win.

PSG and Real clearly have much the strongest squads in the tournament, but... neither have really showed their best yet. Ousmane Dembélé is only just back from his injury, and while he looked very sharp in his 20-minute cameo at the weekend, it seems unlikely he's yet ready to start a game. Ditto Kylian Mbappé, returning as a late impact sub after a debilitating spell of stomach illness. I would favour PSG to prevail in that semi-final - but it's really a bit of a coin-toss: one or two moments of genius from one of the several outstanding talents on either side could turn the match on its head.

And whoever comes through that 'de facto Final' could still face an unpleasant surprise in the actual Final. The two giants of Europe might have the star-studded rosters, but it's the teams in the other semi-final, Fluminense and Chelsea, who seem to have got some momentum going for them in the tournament. I've been really impressed by how Chelsea, despite suffering potentially devastating setbacks in their last two games (an unjust last-gasp penalty award against them in the Benfica game, and then a wondergoal [or 'outrageous fluke'.... or yet another Sanchez cock-up.... depending on your persuasion] from young Estevao Willian in the Palmeiras clash). bounced back confidently to power through to victory anyway. But Fluminense are looking like the best team in the tournament; not the best club or the best squad or the team with the best players, but the team that is playing together best as a team.... and hence 'punching above their weight'. Without any 'big names', they are just functioning superbly well as a unit, consistently showing themselves well-organised, hard-working - and giving up very few chances.

The odds are, I fear, that either of these two will choke when they face such a daunting and glamorous opponent in the Final; but they are potentially good enough to win it, if they can hold their nerve and concentration. But I haven't a clue who will win their semi-final against each other.

With all three of the remaining games in this Club World Cup probably being too close to call with any confidence, where does that leave us with selections for the Fantasy game?

Well, as I said the other day, I think we just have to hedge our bets a bit, by not taking too many players from any one club. (Even in a tournament where one of the ties does look very one-sided, it's still a huge risk to go all-in on a team by taking 5 or 6 of their players. An upset result could devastate your prospects in the subsequent round.)  I should try to put together a separate post on tactics for knockout tournaments in a day or two.

GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

Happy 4th July!

 

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for America. (The country and its people, that is. Its government has generally tended to be a force-for-ill in the world, even on the rare occasions when they have managed to elect a decent and competent person to the Presidency...)  I've spent quite a bit of time there: probably several months in total, by now. Four of my best friends from college days relocated over there, so I always have excuses to nip over for a visit when I can. And I've experienced four or five July 4ths over there.

And their big annual holiday has always seemed a surprisingly un-jingoistic event to me. I'm not usually a fan of National Days, as they get too bound up in obnoxious nationalism (and often with forced 'celebration' of the government [looking at you, China!]), But even the public parades for the 4th July in America always seem to have a strong community focus, rather than a national or global one. And the majority of the celebration seems to just involve getting together with family or friends for a big barbecue somewhere. And probably those indulgences will be spread across the entire weekend...  Plenty to like about that!

I can't visit my American and America-based friends this weekend, but I shall be thinking of them. And I am hoping I will be able to join in with their festivities in spirit by finding myself a pulled pork sandwich somewhere....

I imagine all the firecrackers and nationwide jollity will add to the atmosphere of the crucial quarter-final games being played in the Club World Cup over there this weekend. Looking foward to it!

Best wishes for the Holiday Weekend to any American readers I may have garnered on here!!!

A little bit of Zen (49)

 

“Life is very short and anxious - for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger)

What next?

 

Well, well, well - the big 'upset' I barely dared to wish for has indeed come to pass, with Pep's Manchester City being well-beaten by Al Hilal on Monday night (turns out that, even with new players onboard and tweaks of set-up.... City are still defenceless against counter-attacks!). And on the same day, Inter Milan, who came so close to winning Serie A and the Champions League this season, were booted out of the Club World Cup by lowly Fluminense.

After two such expectation-defying results in quick succession, we should be very wary of prognosticating on the quarter-final round of this fascinating competition. But I'll try....

It is unfortunate that, thanks to Bayern screwing up in their final group game against Benfica, the two teams which I - and everyone else! - had expected to be the leading contenders for the title wound up in the same half of the draw, and are playing each other in a quarter-final. It is hard not to regard this as probably the de facto final, since no-one else in the competition - not even Real Madrid - has looked anywhere near these two so far.

The additional excitement/uncertainty in this clash of the titans centres on the possible impact of Ousmane Dembele and Jamal Musiala. Both have been struggling with injury, but seem to be possibly poised for a full return. I fear it's unlikely that either of them will in fact play the full 90 minutes, and they're unlikely to be anywhere near their best, even if they do; but even a cameo from players of this calibre can turn a match...

Bayern have struggled for consistency so far, and there are question-marks over their somewhat makeshift defence. Harry Kane appears to have brought his scoring boots to the tournament; but we haven't seen that much of a threat from anyone else (except in that Auckland game, which obviously doesn't count). Before the tournament kicked off, I worried that their Champions League triumph might have taken some of the edge off PSG's appetite-for-glory - but it doesn't look like it; they seem eager and determined to me, intent on further success. So, I'd be betting on PSG for this one - although it might be very close, and I'm hoping above all for a really good game. (A few weeks ago, I would have said that this match-up was almost bound to be the 'Game of the Tournament'; but now it's going to be very hard to top Al Hilal's stirring demolition of City!)

Real Madrid have been misfiring a little so far (also nearly getting beaten by Inzaghi's Al Hilal in the group stage). With Mbappe out with illness, and Vini Jnr and Rodrygo blowing hot and cold with remarkable rapidity, they've lacked much incisiveness up front. But there are signs that new manager Xabi Alonso is starting to put his stamp on them, and I'd expect them to get better with each game. And they are a club that loves to win big trophies, so they might have a very good chance in the likely semi-final against PSG or Bayern, (Yep, sorry, Dortmund, you just haven't looked very good in this tournament so far, and it will be a cold day in hell before you can upset Los Blancos here....)

For sentimentalists it's perhaps a pity that the last round's two 'giant-killers', Fluminense and Al Hilal, have to go up against each other now; but at least that guarantees there'll be at least one non-European team in the semi-finals - which must be good for the tournament, and for its aim of promoting the development of the world game across other continents.  Alas, I feel Fluminense have relied mainly on defensive stubbornness, and they've probably now gone a bit further than they really deserved to. Meanwhile, Simone Inzaghi, one of the most inventive and inspirational coaches to emerge in the last few years, seems to have been able to work some of his magic on Al Hilal immediately - and they now look like they wouldn't be at all out of place in the semi-final, or the final,.... or even winning the Cup (if the European big boys from the other half of the draw should happen to have a slightly off day against them). Would that console Inzaghi for the pain of his parting from Inter, would it make up for that damp squib of a performance in the Champions League Final? Will he have an opportunity of revenge against PSG??  It would be quite a fairytale! I wouldn't bet on it. But I do dream fondly of the possibility.

Palmeiras v Chelsea might be the toughest of the lot to call. The Brazilian side have looked very good so far, but, as with Fluminense, I have a feeling that their charge may have run out of steam now - having already progressed a little bit further than they probably expected. And the loss of Joaquin Piquerez and Gustavo Gomez to suspension is bound to weaken them in defence. Chelsea will similarly be missing their midfield lynchpin Moises Caicedo after he picked up a second yellow card against Benfica (there's an amnesty on accumulated yellow cards after this round, so we can probably expect some uninhibited tackling in these games!!), but hopefully that won't have quite such a damaging impact, so long as Romeo Lavia's still fit (presumably Enzo Fernandez will drop back alongside him in the double-pivot, which will reduce their attacking options - but it shouldn't be the end of the world). Cole Palmer has started to show some of his magic again, having a fierce near-post shot heroically clawed away by Trubin in the Benfica match, and being credited with assists on two of the four Chelsea goals. It would be nice to see him really catch fire again in this tournament; and Palmeiras look like a good opportunity for that to happen. Moreover, the spirit Chelsea showed the other night in not being disheartened by the unjust penalty award against them in the dying minutes of regular time, but immediately refocusing again and powering on to a comfortable win - that was really very impressive. Sure, Benfica having a man sent off almost as soon as the extra time started was a big help, but that didn't really appear to be the decisive factor; Chelsea were playing with a determination and self-belief that would surely have carried them through against a full-strength opponent. I think that could be the kind of momentum shift that can help carry a team to a title. But we shall see. I'm not completely convinced of Maresca's acuity as a coach, and I can equally imagine them suddenly reverting to the under-performing mess they were from December to April last season.

And from the Fantasy point of view - many people have just received a painful reminder about the importance of spreading risk in your selections in a knockout tournament like this. I've come across a number of opponents in my mini-leagues who are now left without 7 or 8 players (just through eliminations - never mind possible injuries or suspensions, or elective changes you might hanker to make on grounds of form or whatever), and have only 4 Free Transfers to work with going into this round. Alas, you just have to restrict yourself to 2-players-per-club in the 'Round of 16' (never mind that the game allows you more...), even if you're really confident they're bound to go through to the next round (so many people felt like that about City!!). And you can't afford to take any players from clubs that you're not really confident will go through. (It's unlikely that even an outstanding points-prospect like Yildiz or Otamendi can produce a good haul in a game they don't win. And even if, by some miracle, they did - you have to weigh that against being left with a short squad when they're eliminated; and against not getting any of those juicy extra points from them under the 'Qualification Bonus' chip [which really should have been played on the 'Round of 16' - as the games are only going to get even more difficult to predict from here on...].)  Indeed, you really want to focus on the clubs you think will win not only the quarter-finals, but the semis too - to put yourself in the strongest possible position for the Final; but with unpleasant surprises always possible in a knockout competition, you can't afford to lean too heavily into any one team. (still no more than 3 or 4 players-per-club for the quarter-finals, I'd say).

However, given the facility in this Fantasy game to make multiple 'manual substitutions' - and take a second guess at your captaincy choice mid-stream! - during the MatchDay, your bench has enormous value. (In every round so far, I've had at least 3 or 4 of my original starters who returned only 2 or 3 points - or 1, or 0,... or -1! - but who I was able to replace with a bench player who produced at least 5 or 6 points. On that basis alone, it is certainly worth taking as many 'hits' as you need to in order to restore your squad to full strength (particularly as paid transfters here only cost 3 points rather than the 4 points we're accustomed to in FPL). And even if you're not swayed by the cold logic of mathematics on this (or you just can't be bothered with the additional hassle of attending to in-game substitutions), it's dangerous to leave your squad short because that's just saving up more woe for the next round. You should expect that at least one team in the last eight will go out 'unexpectedly' (plus, of course, either Paris or Bayern must), and if you already had holes in your squad, you could find yourself very short going into the semi-finals. You'll have 5 Free Transfers to address those problems with; but if all or most of those have to get used simply on plugging gaps, you won't be able to do much in the way of elective transfers to bring in the players hitting the hottest form.

In tournaments like this, it's vital to plan to try to minimize the number of players who get eliminated from your squad in each knockout round. And if the breaks go against you, and you lose a lot of players anyway - you just have to bite the bullet and spend points to replace them. 

The one exception is that you might feel able to do without a back-up keeper - particularly in this tournament, as the three best goalies are now adjacent to each other in the draw and will play against each other in a quarter- and semi-final (so, you might want to avoid all of them until the Final...). Keeping a cheaper second keeper from the 'Round of 16', even after they've been eliminated, can be a useful 'budget enabler' to help you strengthen your core squad a little. But for the rest of the bench, I wouldn't want to go light. If you're really confident in your initial starters, you might perhaps leave one empty seat rather than spend points on another transfer - but that's about it.  (Except in the Final, of course; there, with no more manual substitutions possible, the bench suddenly has very limited value, and it probably won't hurt too much to leave it completely empty.)

==

It ain't FAIR!

 

It is a recurring problem in big knockout tournaments like the current World Club Cup that the Fantasy games based on them have never given any thought to how to deal with extra time. (Presumably this is a problem with the knockout stages of the Champions League as well, but I've never played Fantasy in that competition.)

To me, it seems plainly unjust that a goalkeeper (or a defender) who keeps a clean sheet for 90 minutes, should then be penalised for conceding in the extra time period (particularly if the game's decided by a solitary goal!);... whereas one of his defensive teammates who didn't play the full 90 minutes, was perhaps even subbed off barely past the hour, gets a full 'clean sheet bonus'.

In last Saturday's knife-edge contest between Palmeiras and Botafogo, the Botafogo keeper, John, produced a superb display (I counted at least 6 saves from him, 3 of them outstanding; but he was somehow only credited with 4 saves, which was only worth a paltry single extra point - a further instance of injustice), but thanks to Paulinho's extra-time winner for Palmeiras, he wound up with a scant 3 points. His fullback, Alex Telles, was subbed off just after the hour yet received twice as many points. That is a jarring unfairness in the game.              [I perhaps shouldn't complain too much, as Telles, despite his unfortunate booking in that game, and the lack of the hoped-for additional 'Qualification Bonus' points, has been one of my most reliable returners so far, yielding 34 points across four games.]

It seems to me it would be better to award the clean-sheet points for the 90 minutes only. Additional points could be offered for maintaining a further clean sheet throughout the additional period of play (perhaps 2 points for defenders and keepers who play all of it?), but that doesn't really seem necessary. Extra time is designed to break a deadlock, and produces goals - sometimes quite a lot of them - more often than not.... if only because players are getting knackered and making more mistakes. When the extra period does remain goalless, it's usually because one or both sides have decided they fancy their chances more in a penalty shootout and have just stonewalled for most of the final 30 minutes - and I don't think we should be rewarding that kind of negativity.

Most Fantasy points are awarded for individual game actions; but the clean-sheet points are given for a cumulative achievement over a fixed span of time. I think that span ought to be limited to 90 minutes.

It also seems anomalous that penalty shootouts are not usually recognised in the points system at all. I think an additional 1 (or 2?) points for every successful conversion, and perhaps an additional point for scoring the decisive penalty (or making the decisive save) would be in order, along with perhaps 3 points for the keeper for each save (but only for saves, not misses...!).

How about this, FIFA? Please try to sort this out for the World Cup next year!

Too close for comfort...

 

Darn - well, much as I expected, this 'Round of 16' stage in the new Club World Cup has been very finely balanced so far.

I suppose the bookies made Palmeiras and Chelsea the favourites to go through from their ties - but only very narrowly. And the games were even closer than that. In the all-Brazil clash of Palmeiras against Botafogo, there was absolutely nothing to choose between them, with both defences on top more than the attacks, and an isolated goal from Paulinho clinching a win in extra time. That was particularly rough on the Botafogo keeper, John, who'd done heroic work between the sticks and deserved far more from the game.

Chelsea had been rather more on top in their encounter, but couldn't convert dominance into goals against an excellent Benfica defence, and also found themselves going into extra time after their opponents conjured up a last-gasp equaliser. The way they roused themselves from that setback to go on and win comfortably in extra time was most impressive, and should lend their campaign good momentum going forward into the quarter-finals.

Although Bayern had a slightly easier time of it, Flamengo showed a lot of threat, and briefly had the German giants a bit rattled when they twice clawed themselves back into the game by reducing the lead to a single goal.

Only PSG have so far enjoyed a smooth passage through to the quarter-finals - against Inter Miami, whose qualifying for the knockout stage was really a bit of a fluke, and so produced the only really heavily mismatched fixture of this round.

After all that excitement, I'm wondering if we might have an upset or two in store somewhere in the remaining four games. I said the other day that I think Juventus could certainly beat Real Madrid. But Inter Milan, Dortmund and Manchester City aren't by any means invulnerable, and I fancy Fluminense, Monterrey and Al Hilal - who are on a bit of a high from their performances so far - could at least give them a stern test. Let's see.

[Much as I'd love to see an underdog victory in one or more of these games - particularly against Pep's City! - it would completely screw my own Fantasy campaign! I played my Wildcard in the group stage, so I am entirely dependent on correctly guessing how the bracket will pan out if I am to avoid having to pay points for additional transfers to rebuild a decimated squad. And I didn't bet on any of these less-fancied sides.... except Botafogo, which didn't work out for me. Oh, woe!]

'Mystery Chips' - a BAD idea!

 

I mentioned yesterday that I really dislike the idea of 'Mystery Chips'. I may have been prejudiced somewhat by the truly godawful one they visited upon us in FPL this year, but.... I really think they're a bad idea in general.

Here's why:

1)  Fantasy games like this are essentially about planning. So, it is absolutely counter-productive, destructive of the purpose of the game, to introduce elements which prevent players from planning ahead. Introduce new chip ideas occasionally, if you must (I'd really much rather not, though, thank you!) - but at least tell us what they are, before the start of the competition.

2)  This idea of concealing the nature of the new chip for a while necessarily entails that it will have a shortened period of availability, only being launched part-way through the competition. And this causes intolerable congestion, possibly confounding the rest of one's chip strategy. This was ultimately my biggest gripe against FPL's novelty 'Assistant Manager' Chip last season. That only became active in Gameweek 24, so there wasn't that much time left in which to play it; and most Fantasy managers would have kept their 2nd Wildcard and their Free Hit and both the bonus chips for use in that latter part of the season as well. (In fact, the FPL case was even worse, because the new chip had a bloated three-week duration. And, moreover, an expected Double Gameweek for Liverpool was yet to have its date confirmed, and since this was likely to be a prime opportunity to use the Triple Captain chip on Mo Salah [which did indeed pay off handsomely!], nobody could play the new extended chip until they knew for sure which gameweek they had to keep free for that possible TC play.) In effect, many people found they had barely a third of the season in which to try to use up six or seven weeks of chip options. There's a similar problem here in Fantasy Club World Cup: most players will have kept all their chips (except perhaps the Wildcard, which can be worth punting on early, in the group stage), and now have to juggle using a chip in every round.

3) All chips - well, 'bonus' chips, anyway - are unnecessary gimmicks, superfluous to the basic gameplay. They merely introduce the thrill of additional uncertainty - appealing to the gambling addicts out there, but frustrating the majority of serious Fantasy managers who are only seeking a test of their judgement of teams and players. Shifting the stakes of selection decisions with chips like these creates an uneven playing field in individual Gameweeks/MatchDays: you can't really compare your score against other people's when some are playing highly valuable bonus chips and some are not. And having such rare and one-off additions to the game increases the chances that a few players will get absurdly lucky with the chips, and obtain a massive but scarcely deserved advantage from them. Double-points for the captain selection is fine, because that happens every week, and freak instances of luck, good or bad, should generally balance out over the season as a whole. Allowing people to get even more from their captain just once in the year..... is simply betting on a die-roll.

Having said all that, I don't in fact hate the new chip they've introduced in this Fantasy Club World Cup game: the 'Qualifcation Bonus' for players who make it through to the next round. If you're being smart, you should be choosing your squad based on who you think is most likely to qualify for the next round (and the one after that!), and this is - to an extent, anyway - reasonably predictable.

What I don't like about this chip is that, together with the others in the game, it makes the latter stages of the tournament overcrowded with chip options. They should have introduced the 'Qualification Bonus' to replace one of the other two bonus chips.

And 'keeping it a secret' until half-way through - WTF is the point of that?? It's just childish.

Now.... it gets REALLY interesting!

"You won't like me when I'm angry..."

Well, as I mused after the opening batch of games in this inaugural Club World Cup, the group phase didn't turn out to be nearly as straightforward as most people (including me) had expected before the tournament kicked off.

Porto were put out by Messi's Inter Miami, Atletico Madrid (who were really bad...) by relatively unfancied Brazilians Botafogo (who managed to nick a win off a very lacklustre PSG in their second game), Argentine giants River Plate by the far less illustrious Mexican team Monterrey, and RB Salzburg by the Saudi champs Al Hilal. While the first and last of those might have been anticipated as very possible outcomes (the bookies had actually made Al Hilal very slender favourites to qualify over Salzburg, and put Miami - perhaps a little over-generously - within 14 percentage points of Porto), the other two count as pretty major upsets; the bookmakers rated Botafogo a full 25 percentage points less likely to qualify than Atleti, and Moneterrey more than 60 points behind River Plate. Moreover, Chelsea finished second in their group behind the Brazilians Flamengo, and even mighty Bayern Munich slipped up, to finish behind Benfica; while Inter Milan and Borussia Dortmund, both far below their best so far, were also made to struggle a bit to come out on top of their groups. Only Manchester City and Real Madrid cruised through the opening phase relatively comfortably - but even Real were held to a draw by Al Hilal.

Though the weaker clubs took some time to adjust to the pace of the tournament - perhaps overawed by the company they suddenly found themselves in at first - they all showed a fair amount of both grit and flair, and got better as the tournament went on. Only Seattle and Urawa finished without any points, and every team managed to register at least one or two goals.

My pre-tournament sentimental 'outside bet' picks (not to win the thing, but perhaps to qualify for the knockouts, or at least get close to that) didn't quite come through for me. I honestly think Egyptian champs Al Ahly deserved to go further: they're probably better, really, than Miami, and maybe even than Palmeiras - but they were let down by unaccountably terrible finishing in their first two games. My South African darlings, Mamelodi Sundowns, had the opposite problem: if they could defend anywhere near as well as they attacked, they might have toppled Dortmund.

The upshot of some wayward performances by a few of the big names in this first phase (and some dubious weighting of the bracket in the first place...) is that we now have a very unbalanced draw for the knockout rounds: the right side of the draw gives us likely quarter-finals between PSG and Bayern (the two biggest favourites to win the title): and between Real Madrid (or Juventus) and Dortmund (or Monterrey) - possibly the three or four other strongest teams left in the competition, after Manchester City.

In knockout tournaments like this (I've played Fantasy versions of the Euros and the World Cup for some years now), although you get a fairly generous increase in the number of transfers through the later stages of the tournament, which should enable you to get by without needing your Wildcard (which is usually better spent trying to optimise your squad to take advantage of the most mis-matched fixtures in Round 2 of the group phase [and drawing on what you've gleaned about form and selections from the opening games]), you have to limit yourself to players that you're fairly confident will progress to the next round. And you have to be careful how you spread your selection across clubs, to try to make sure that you can't have too many players eliminated, even if you suffer a few results that go against your expectation.

And now there's extra pressure on this first knockout round selection from the fact that the game has announced its 'Mystery Chip' (god, I hate that concept....) is to be a 'Qualification Bonus', where you get 2 points extra for every player who gets through to the next round. (I'll probably have more to say about this new chip a little later....)

In theory, the 'Round of 16' ought to be the best time to play such a chip, because there are likely to be more fixtures where you can be really confident of the result - than in the subsequent rounds, where we expect to find only the best teams still in the competition.

However, things might not have worked out like that this time. Well, there's always a lot of anxiety about these selections in a knockout tournament, because there are few if any completely foregone conclusions. But in this Club World Cup 'Round of 16', I'd say only Manchester City and PSG really look locked-in to progress. The other six match-ups are all a bit too tight to call with any confdence. Juve are certainly good enough to unseat Real; and I think Flamengo have a decent chance of giving Bayern a fright, if they have a little bit of an off day.

So - it's a very tough call whether to use the 'Qualification Bonus' in this round (or one of the other bonus chips instead...). And it's very, very tough to pick who's likeliest to go through between..... Chelsea and Benfica, or Palmeiras and Botafogo, or Inter Milan and Fluminense.

GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

A little bit of Zen (48)

"This would be the best job in the world… if there weren’t any games. 

Defeat is suffering; victory is… happiness? No. Unfortunately, that’s not true. It’s a relief - for a few days, you’re calmer. 

But then, suffering is part of your work, what keeps you alive: the pressure, the stress.” 

Carlo Ancelotti

Nice, while it lasted

 

It's not long ago that I was boosting DAZN's streaming service for the Club World Cup games, complimenting how fast, sharp, and trouble-free I'd been finding it.

Of course, all good things must come to an end. For the past week, their stream has been unusably crappy for the live games, and I've been having to make do with short highlight reels only. Bah!

There are three likely reasons for this: 1) DAZN's capacity is getting stretched by increasing demand, as the tournament starts to attract more attention and excitement; 2) DAZN is deliberately degrading its free streams to try to goad people into paying for a subscription; or 3) It's just that the Internet in general can sometimes be a bit useless in my country of residence - to which I have just returned after a long 'working holiday'.

I suspect it's a combination of all of these. 

Then again, it might just be that the Internet service at the two guesthouses I've been staying in has been particularly poor... (Although I appear to be the only guest at the place I'm in at the moment. And I don't think the manager - heavy though his TikTok addiction is - can be maxing out the bandwidth on his own!)  I must hope that things may improve again when I finally return to my own home this afternoon.

[Well, thank heavens, things are again tickety-boo in the old homestead. Turns out the small but very touristy town I was staying in a few days ago has a notoriously ropey Internet service.

However, DAZN have been getting a bit grumpy about people enjoying their 'free stuff' too much. The annoying pop-ups goading you to subscribe have become a bit more frequent - as has the exasperating tactic of hiding the free content in amongst a whole bunch of paid options that appear identical. Moreover, I found a couple of times when I was being lazy, getting up even after the start of the 'late' game, and long after the 'early' one should have finished, and launching both streams to try to make sure I didn't lose either of them,.... well, they really didn't like that at all. The niggardly bastards started interrupting my feed every couple of minutes - or, even worse, resetting it to the end, forcing me to have to try to scroll all the way back to he point where I'd left off - and occasionally putting up dire warning messages that if I was suffering a terrible streaming experience, it was probably my own fault.... for doing something verboten, like using a VPN, or trying to keep open an expired stream, or using too many streams at once. 

Oh well: what do you want for nothing - rubber biscuit??]

WHO designed this abomination??

 

While I said a few days ago that I really rather like the new Club World Cup tournament, and even the streaming media coverage of it,... I am finding FIFA's Fantasy game derived from it a 'Trail of Tears'.

It is one of the worst-designed game interfaces I've ever seen. Here are just some of the things that absolutely bug the crap out of me about it....

1)  Hideous appearance! A black background - really?? And even the 'pitch' behind your team display is in a depressing charcoal-grey.... WHY?! And unneccessarily huge menu bars at the top take up more than a third of the available screen area. Good grief!

2)  No country leagues?  Not listed as such, anyway. Rather surprisingly, the 'Leaderboard' page gives you an option to search by 'country of residence'; so, in effect, there are - they're just a bit hidden. (And you can only really check the top handful of positions.)

3)  No 'public leagues'?  In the Fantasy Premier League game we're more familiar with, we've grown used to automatically being entered in a giant 'Broadcaster League' based on who has the main TV rights to the EPL in our country or region; and we can opt to enter randomly generated small leagues created by the game; and many other entities - FPL tips websites, and media outlets like Goal and FourFourTwo magazines - also have their own leagues, which are open for anyone to enter. There seems to be none of that in the FIFA game. Or if there are such leagues, they're impossible to find. The search function in the 'Leagues' section produces absolutely no results - not even for leagues that I know exist, not even for leagues that I'm actually in. WTF?

4)  No help in identifying the teams!  When many of the participating teams are unfamiliar to a general audience, it would be nice to be given just a little bit of assistance in recognising who's who. I mean, some easily accessible background information on all the participants would help; maybe even a thumbnail 'team bio', or at least the full name of the team, in a small pop-up window when you hover your cursor over the team crest or abbreviation? But no, none of that. And they don't even use commonsense abbreviations for the team names. The two East Asian sides end up being the easily confusible UHD and URD. And who outside Brazil is going to have any clue that SEP might signify Palmeiras? Who, anywhere (even in Portugal?), is going to readily understand that Benfica are SFB rather than BEN? [Aha, I discover Benfica's acronym is actually SLB... I had been thinking 'Futebol' must be in there somewhere.]  (And a friend has just told me that on the mobile app, they've recently switched to showing player portraits rather than the team strips?! Sigh.)

5)  A perversely unhelpful UI all around!  If you're opting to take advantage of manual substitutions during the course of the MatchDay, it's really important to keep track of who's playing when; but the option to display the match date for each player is removed once the MatchDay is underway - so, you constantly have to refer to a separate fixture list to remind yourself of the substitution options. When making transfers, it would be nice to have the next opponent and the match date and the player price all visible simultaneously - rather than having to repeatedly toggle between different view options. Selecting one of the 'Booster' chips is only possible by clicking on an icon - whose significance is non-intuitive, and which they do absolutely nothing to draw anyone's attention to (I would bet that a significant proportion of managers will fail to use some or all of their 'Boosters' because they didn't know how to access them), I could go on and on.....

6)  No non-availability flags?  OK, I can see that trying to keep abreast of the full injury situation in such a big tournament (especially when manager press conferences seem to be few and mostly rather uninformative) might be a bit more trouble than they're willing to go to. But we've had several players pick up bans for receiving a red card or two yellow ones - and I haven't seen any indication of that in any of the in-game displays.

7)  Horrendously clunky player search!  The ability to even set search terms when trying to review transfer options is hidden: there's a weird and entirely non-intuitive icon you have to click to open a search box. Once you've found this, it can be vexingly fiddly to select the options you want: sometimes it takes multiple attempts to check or uncheck a box. And then the bloody thing is continually resetting the search parameters by itself. And that righthand sidebar area is constantly being obscured by an annoying dropdown from the menu bar above (inadvertently activated by moving your cursor anywhere near it??). [Really: that happened every single time I tried to use the 'player search/player selection function during the tournament - every single time. I grew to dread it - and am now mightily relieved that I'll never have to suffer it again (well, until Fantasy World Cup hits us next summer, maybe... I hope not!) It's not that difficult to make your game not irksome to play....]  I simply don't believe it...

8)  No 'match reports'/player points breakdowns?!  Nope, there is no information at all offered within the Fantasy section of the FIFA website about how the games actually went down, apart from the scoreline. If you even just want to know who scored the goals, you have to dig out a match report elsewhere! If you want to know who got points for what in a match, you have no recourse but to laboriously search for every individual player and click on their profile to find out. (And I'm not sure if that works for players you don't have in your squad...)  Absolute INSANITY!!!

9)  No tabulated player stats??  Again, if you're trying to make smart transfer choices, it's nice to be able to compare the full roster of available players across a number of different metrics. But FIFA Fantasy has no 'Stats' page - so you can't compare players by anything other than their total points return shown in the transfer selection list.

10)  Screwed-up budget/player pricing!!  I know, it might seem perverse to complain about being given too much money; Fantasy managers traditionally moan about the opposite. But it is, I think, another sign of how badly this game has been put together. Now, OK, maybe the game's developers did not anticipate that Mbappe and Dembele would be injured at the start of the tournament, or that the likes of Kane, Haaland, and Vini Jnr would have a relatively subdued start - but perhaps they should have! And even if these premium-priced players had all been at the top of their game, there would often be a case for preferring a less illustrious attacker facing a very weak opponent, and/or offering the opportunity to earn the very valuable 'Scouting Bonus' for a low-owned player. The few very expensive players are not - at least in the early part of the competition - all that compelling; and there are far too many good alternatives at low and mid-prices. And how does a very capable goalkeeper who's first-choice at one of the clubs who are favourites to qualify out of their group get priced at only 4.0 million??  Franco Armani was a budget-enabling windfall for everyone - but his ludicrous pricing was an egregious mistake. In a Fantasy game like this, you really should not have 5 or 10 million left unused. For me, this was another sign - one of many - that this game has been put together with a mix of haste and idiocy.

11)  No information about participation levels??  There is no display anywhere on the FIFA Fantasy pages about the size of the global leaderboard; and I can't find anything about that anywhere else online either. Given that my 'home' country apparently has less than 2% of the participants we typically see in FPL, and that I've mostly been up in the top 10,000, which is considerably better than I've generally managed in FPL,... it would be reasonable to assume that the total number of managers taking part in FIFA Fantasy Club World Cup is only 100,000 to 200,000.  Which leads me to my final point....

12)  'Unsearchable' global leaderboard! It is quite laborious to search the global rankings in FPL; but at least they're divided up into 'pages' of 50, so you can select a page number in the URL in the estimated range you're interested in looking at. In this game, you can only click a 'See more' button at the bottom of the list, allowing you to keep increasing the length of the scroll. It only shows 20 places in each 'reveal', so it would take an inordinately long time to to get to the bottom of the league. But, of course, that's just not possible anyway, because such a long 'page' eats up too much memory - and either the site freezes or your browser crashes before you can get anywhere near even 10,000th place. 

[Oh, also.... it's really annoying that they only share 'team names', not 'usernames' in all the ranking displays: I don't even know who's who in my regular little mini-leagues!! And when you click on another manager/team to check their performance, why on earth does the display always surreptitiously default to the MD1 result rather than the current Match Day??  It's like every single aspect of this website has been designed to be as annoying and nonsensical as possible!  Perhaps that is what they were going for....???]

As the tournament went on, I also discovered that there was evidently a problem with the extra points supposedly being awarded to players in different positions for specific game actions: they appeared not to be being calculated accurately or consistently - or certainly not in a way that seemed at all fair or predictable. I suspect that's down to using unreasonably narrow defintions of the relevant terms, such that the majority of game actions that you'd reasonably expect to receive credit are somehow being excluded from the count.

I am loving this tournament. And I am enjoying following it with the Fantasy game. But damn, they have made it unreasonably difficult to play!!!

Rise of the Minnows

 

Well, damn, I thought the 2nd Round of the FIFA Club World Cup was poised to get interesting,... but I didn't anticipate quite how interesting that latest tranche of games would be. It's almost like 'Night of the Lepus'....

The big boys of Europe continue to sputter,.... while the rest of the world - some of them, anyway - are looking more and more dangerous.

We saw the first proper upsets of the competition, with Inter Miami nicking a late win they scarcely deserved over Porto (thanks, inevitably, to a trademark Leo Messi free-kick going straight in), and then Flamengo somehow did the same to Chelsea (not quite such an apparent mismatch in class there, the sides perhaps quite evenly balanced in fact; but Chelsea looked to have been absolutely dominant in the first half, yet somehow failed to build on their early lead; then had a stone-cold penalty turned down [the story of their EPL season still continuing....]; then conceded two silly goals; then had Nicolas Jackson get himself sent off [although the straight red was a bit harsh: it was a case of lightly raking his studs down an opponent's shin as he misjudged where to put his foot down, rather than steaming into the guy at full pace with a raised foot - only really a yellow card infraction]). And European Champions Paris St Germain went down rather tamely 1-0 to Brazilians Botafogo (one of the less fancied South American sides in this competition), leaving them quite likely to only qualify second in Group B.

Boca Juniors scored first, and made mighty Bayern toil to a narrow win. Al Hillal toughed out a draw against Salzburg, just as they had in their opener against Real Madrid. Monterrey put up an impressive peformance in a goalless but entertaining draw with the much higher-rated River Plate. And Esperance de Tunisie, one of the least talked-about African representatives, bagged themselves a win - albeit against a fairly woeiful Los Angeles.

Even some of the weaker teams went down fighting, with Wydad Casablanca, Urawa, Pachuca, and even the Seattle Sounders all coming up with a goal (to scupper our clean-sheet hopes for the round!!); Ulsan managed two, briefly putting the wind up Fluminense! And the Mamelodi Sundowns - my sentimental favourites, who I would dearly love to see squeak into the knockout phase - were constantly dangerous against Dortumund: scored three, could have scored more,.... might have won the game but for some suicidal goalkeeping/defending.

Even the two most out-classed teams in the competition (after poor little Auckland), Al Ain and Al Ahly, showed a lot of improvement. But for a couple of catastrophic goalkeeping errors gifting Manchester City a comfortable lead within 25 minutes or so, and then a very soft penalty awarded against them on the stroke of half-time, Al Ain might have done a lot better in the game. It wasn't until the last 20 minutes or so that City really began to ratchet up the pressure and push for the additional goals they needed to be able to finish top of the group with only a draw against Juventus on Thursday. For much of the match, the Abu Dhabi team were well in it, often catching City out with quick breaks; Chadli, in particular, had two or three excellent chances to score. And Egyptian champions Al Ahly actually look a very decent footballing side, but they've been let down twice now by some atrocious finishing (they really should have put Inter Miami to bed by half-time in the tournament opener).

Contrary to pessimistic predictions before the tournament, NONE of these teams are absolutely terrible (not even Auckland: I believe they've still got it in them to pick up a goal or two, and give Boca a bit of a scare), and many of the non-European sides have actually proved themselves pretty useful. Auckland, of course, and Al Ain and Al Ahly (although these latter two surely haven't yet produced their best in America), and Seattle and Los Angeles and Miami (apart from glimpses of the magic of Old Leo, and the superlative form of their veteran Argentinian goalkeeper, Oscar Ustari, they look pretty pedestrian too) are the only teams that look well out of their depth. But Miami could well sneak through to the Round of 16, thanks to the Messi Factor (and the fact that Porto have been so poor). Almost anyone else could still produce a bit of an upset. And 24 of the 32 teams still have at least a hypothetical chance of qualifying for the next stage. Not many people predicted that.

Bring it on!!  (Come on, Sundowns!!!!!!)

A little bit of Zen (47)

 

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

Charles Darwin

Now it's getting INTERESTING....

 

As 'MatchDay 1' has just drawn to a close, I am putting together some further thoughts on FIFA's new club tournament, as it unfolds before us.

And I have to say, I am favourably impressed. 

There was a lot to carp at about this new venture: it's probably too big a tournament, at least for the first iteration; the selection of participating teams was subject to some unfortunate chicanery (inevitable with FIFA, alas: and anything that has Gianni Infantino's smug, unctuous visage associated with it is automatically tainted...); and it's been very poorly promoted over the past year (I work pretty hard to stay on top of football news, but I don't think I even knew it was happening until about six months ago, and had to do a lot of digging to discover basic details like when and where it was to be held and who the participating clubs would be); and of course, one worries about the toll on the players (exhaustion and increased susceptibility to injury likely to be a problem for some at the start of the new domestic season in a couple of months). But... I think the idea is admirable: a larger, more inclusive tournament than we've seen before, to provide a stage for leading clubs from all regions to test themselves against each other. (Some of the clubs from nations that are less developed - economically and in their footballing infrastructure - are inevitably not going to be able to make much impression in the competition at this stage. But they will one day. And experiences like this will help them get there.)

However, it had been commonly supposed - and I had fallen prey to that pessimism myself - that the group stage of the tournament would be largely redundant, as few if any of the teams from other continents would be able to compete with the might of the big Europeans sides. And that hasn't entirely been the case. With the inevitable exception of plucky little Auckland - part-timers providing token representation from Oceania - and El Ain.... and, yes, the US clubs.... everyone else has put up a respectable challenge. 

Perhaps the Europeans just haven't hit their stride yet. I feel that Bayern and PSG cruised to easy wins against weak opponents without really playing all that well; as did Manchester City and Chelsea, winning less emphatically, but still quite comfortably. But Salzburg, Porto, Inter, Dortmund, Benfica, and even Atletico all performed rather poorly in their opening games. While even some of the less fancied South American teams like Botafogo, Fluminense, and Monterrey have all looked quite handy. (And I'm starting to get moderately excited about the prospects for my dark horse favourites, South Africa's Mamelodi Sundowns.)

It certainly looks like we could have some more exciting and unpredictable clashes in prospect over the next two group rounds than we had anticipated. And there does seem to be a chance - still slim, perhaps, but far from negligible - that a few 'surprise' teams will make it through to the knockout phase.

For me, the one team who've looked really good so far were Juventus. I would be amazed if young Francisco Conceição (above) has not shot up to being one of the most-owned Fantasy players in this tournament by the start of MatchDay 2.

The media coverage provided by DAZN has been pretty impressive too. I found the sign-up process surprisingly swift and painless: regiestering a phone number was glitchy, and of course you had to click through a few distracting attempts to upsell you to one of the paid subscription versions of their service - but it really wasn't too bad at all. (I got up half an hour before the opening game, anticipating - on the basis of similar hellish experiences in the past - that it would probably take me at least that long to navigate the minefield of  'freemium registration'; but it took barely two minutes. So.... I was able to watch almost the whole of the pre-game show! Talk about a mixed blessing....)

Their streams seem very fast and stable, and have very good resolution. This is way the best online coverage I've ever watched - just the gradual advance of technology, I guess. (And NO - I'm not being paid to say this.)  The commentators are required to plug upcoming paid events on the channel occasionally; and you do get banner ads popping up around the edges of the screen once in a while - but you have to expect a little of this sort of thing with a free service, and I'm really not finding it unduly intrusive.

The problems, however, arise with non-lve viewing.... The highlights reels promoted in my sidebar on Youtube are almost invariably in Spanish. (I presume this is a sign that the tournament has a big following in Latin America, and so Spanish versions of the highlights are posted first... and/or made more 'prominent' to the platform in other ways)  Finding an English option takes a bit of digging around. The Youtube 'search engine', never great, seems to have become extremely artificially stupid in the last year or so: despite suggesting via auto-complete 'in English commentary' as a useful tag for improving search results, the search engine appears to be ignorant of what this means, and still usually directs you to highlights in every language other than English. You can root out some English clips eventually, but it's a little bit of a rigmarole. And they always seem to be very short - whereas some of the Spanish compilations last for 12 or 14 minutes (I'm scraping the rust off the little bit of Spanish I learnt in my schooldays....).

I do find it slightly vexing that the DAZN site itself implies that full 'as live' re-runs are available to non-subscribed viewers, but.... when you click on these options, you find that they're only brief highlights. They appear to be labelled as 'Full Replay' on the control bar at the bottom of the screen, but this turns out to be a cruel deception: when you hover your mouse-cursor over this description, you discover that it is in fact a rolling menu - with 'Full Replay' and 'Extended Hihglights' revealed as 'locked' to non-subscribers when you click on them. I suppose this is the kind of low trickery they need to resort to try to squeeze a few new subscriptions for themselves out of the interest in this tournament, but.... it is mightily vexing.

The 'workaround' I've discovered is that while a match/programme is still in progress, you can select the option to view it from the beginning. This certainly seems to continue to be available while the post-match discussion is going on (half an hour or so after the game has ended); and it might possibly continue to be so even after the show has ended..... though probably not for very long? Anyhow, in my timezone, this means that I can get up at around 7am to watch the match that started at 5am (on UTC+6) by 'rewinding' to the start (and you can use the slider bar on the bottom of the screen to fast-forward through the ads and studio bits); and then do the same again for the 7am game a couple of hours later, joining at the very end, and scrolling back to the start. (Again, this is much better - and more conveniently timed - coverage than I am able to enjoy with Premier League games!)

And the Fantasy game itself...?  Well, that's a right pain-in-the-arse, isn't it?  But that, I think, will have to get a post all of its own.... soon.