Is there any interest in having a friendly competition over the next few months?
I’ve been in the German soccer/Fußball league’s (Bundesliga) fantasy game over the past few years. I was thinking many some Mudspikers would be interested in that.
The Bundesliga season goes from 8/23 to the end of May next year. (34 match days). Each matchday we have an opportunity to set up our lineup on who we think is best for that week (keeping within budget).
At the start of the season, you have 150 million and you have to pick 15 players. The challenge is to pick the best sampling of players that will get you the most points. Each member will be able to pick the same players (unlike fantasy US football where the players are exclusive to a particular fantasy team).
Unfortunately, starting this year, it appears you can only play via a phone app. Previous years allowed players to use a website to pick their team. The app is sub-par, IMO, but it is, what it is.
The season starts Friday 8/23, so if you want to play and try to get maximum points, please set up your team and let me know your team name, so I can send you a league invite.
Welcome aboard. This should, hopefully be a fun ride. There are resources out there (official bundesliga page, kicker.de, transfermarkt, etc that should help)
To the others that haven’t joined, come on, this will probably be more fun than doing your income taxes each year, and you do those!
To the gang at Schurem’s Flight Club, specifically those that friendly fired me and shot down an unhostile hostile noob, you owe me.
I’m of German descent, so German things interest me. Also, I’ve been to many of the towns in the league or at least know their location on the map. In other leagues, I’m not as familiar with towns/locations and those leagues didn’t resonate. Back in 2015, Fox Sports in the US started showing Bundesliga matches, usually like 5 matches per weekend and I watched all of them, every week. I discovered that the official site had a fantasy game and I convinced several work colleagues to join.
Man, I struggled with setting my lineup. It’s much more difficult this year. You can’t just pick the obvious players who will get a lot of points. They raised the cost of good players significantly, so you can’t stack known good players and are forced to pick randos and hope you do well.
I guess that’s the big challenge for this year. We’ll know 2-3 weeks into the season how the point system affects things. I think there’s an international break after matchday 2, where we can completely change our lineup, so that’ll be good.
I have no experience with these kind of games and haven’t really read all of the rules or scoring system
I kind of min-maxed and have some of the cheapest players on the bench who will probably never see action in the Bundesliga. Not sure if this is a solid strategy
From what I understood, your bench players will not receive any points, right?
In previous years, you had to actively sub in/sub out your players during the weekend (if you wanted to maximum points). If some players played on Friday or early Saturday, you could go in and exchange bench players, risking the potential matchday performance over players that already played.
The fantasy owners made it simpler now. You pick your entire team (in the line-up and on the bench). You then “star” your best players (forward, midfield and defenders) and they’ll get extra points during the weekend.
Points are recorded for the ‘dressed players’ and the ‘bench players’. If a bench player gets more points than a dressed player, then that player is swapped in automatically during the weekend (as i understand it) If somebody did back on a Friday and somehow got negative points, you can still manually go in a swap them out too.
Keep in mind your formation as well. 3-4-3, 2-5-3, 3-3-4, etc. Your formation depends on the number of good players you have per position. If you picked 3 top shelf forwards, you might want to have a formation that plays them all. If you went midfield heavy in talent, you might want a formation that favors that. Example, if you went midfield heavy in talent and pick 3-3-4, then only 3 midfielders points will out and you might have major points sitting on the bench unused.
At the risk of irritating those that are tired of seeing this announcement…
1 more day to go until the Bundesliga season starts. For those that haven’t signed up yet, now’s your chance to get your team set before the start of the season.
And for those epic people that have signed up, make sure you pick your players, that they are in the line up and your 3 players are ‘starred’ to get extra points.
Can we stop the league right now while my team is in front?
I kind of messed up (this probably won’t me the last time in this thread). I didn’t check for injured players before matchday. I wasted 30M of my budget for players that won’t be able to play. To make things worse I don’t have substitutes for my 3-5-2 mid field. Even if I had they would be no names. I think my min-max gamble won’t pay off. Time for a rebuilt in the Länderspielpause.
Tbh, I don’t follow the Bundesliga that close anymore. My club Hertha is playing in the Second Bundesliga, as do many of the traditional clubs like Schalke, HSV, Kaiserslautern, KSC, Köln. It’s a pretty attactive league because anything can happen.
Bundesliga on the other hand had a rather boring strech of FC Bayern dominating everything for the last decade. It was quite a sensation for Leverkusen to take the title undefeated last season. Then again Leverkusen isn’t really a popular club either, because it’s kind of a department from the Bayer AG. In general Bundesliga is developing on a similar path like the Premier League. A handful of clubs with big money due to investors leaving not much space for surprises. And prices for live sports are steadily increasing.
With 3 injured players, I thought I was going to get hurt. I must remember to check the squads following the press interviews. Thankfully both my star picks for midfield and forward had decent games. Kramiric did well for me, he was one of the players that I know and have seen play live when he was at my team (Leicester).
500 points more than on the first match day. Still learning how it all works.
A little bit of bad luck that my only real keeper was injured. I’m not gonna spend the time on this game to get injury reports for each player in my squad every week
