UCL Fantasy Football: Learn from the top managers

Whether you're resuming your Fantasy campaign after the group stage or you are new to the game, it is never a bad idea to learn from the top managers.

To that end, UEFA.com have delved into the key statistics and identified some trends from the current top 1000 managers to help you in your quest for #UCLfantasy glory.

Time your chips wisely

Whether it’s the Wildcard or the Limitless chip, there are plenty of points to be gained from deploying these at the right time. Before each matchday, assess your squad, study the fixtures and decide whether it's worth activating them. During the group stage, 850 of the top 1000 managers used both of their chips, and clearly to good effect, although the flip side of that is those who still have them in their back pocket can make significant gains up the rankings.

Key stats

• Overall, Matchday 4 was the most popular time to use the Wildcard chip amongst #UCLfantasy managers, although Matchday 3 was more popular among the top 1k (271 managers)
• Matchday 4 was also the time most Limitless chips were used overall, but again the top managers thought differently; 413 of the current top 1000 played it on Matchday 2

Tinkering can pay off

The top managers know that paying close attention to their squads – especially while a matchday is in progress – can help them gain an edge over the rest. No less than 964 of the top 1000 managers made changes to their squad on all six matchdays during the group stage. Whether it's making a transfer, a manual substitution or a captain change, the hands-on approach more often than not can gain you points.

Key stats

• On each matchday, over 90% of the top 1k made at least one manual substitution between gamedays. Matchday 2 was the most popular example, with 985 managers making changes before the second set of games
• Ahead of Matchday 6, 71.9% of the top 1k transferred in Neymar, who scored 18 points. This was the single most popular transfer across all six matchdays
• Taking points hits for transfers became increasingly popular with each matchday among those in the top 1k:
  Matchday 2: 3.9%
  Matchday 3: 7.0%
  Matchday 4: 15.9%
  Matchday 5: 18.6%
  Matchday 6: 34.2%

Forwards are favoured for captaincy

It's not surprising that forwards are more commonly captained than other positions in #UCLfantasy, but the top 1k in particular tend to reserve the armband for their forward line. Over the course of the six matchdays so far, forwards were captained 82.1% of the time by the elite managers, as opposed to 75.6% overall. There were a couple of occasions where other positions proved popular though, such as Matchday 5 where 20% of the top 1k captained a defender. #UCLfantasy top points scorer Cristian Romero was heavily favoured on that occasion, with 100 managers in the top 1k handing him the armband.

Key stats

• The most popular captain choice in a single matchday amongst the top 1k managers was Lionel Messi on Matchday 1 – 72.2%. This far outweighs the most popular pick when taking into account all managers, which was Robert Lewandowski on Matchday 3 – 26.6%
• The matchday which featured the most captain changes was Matchday 5, when over half of the top 1k managers (51.8%) made a captaincy switch

While there is an element of luck involved in Fantasy, you can push the odds in your favour by studying those at the top and how they go about things. After all, some of these managers have a track record of performing well year in and year out, with 18 of the current top 1k having also finished in the top 1000 in each of the last two seasons. Some have gone even better, such as current world number 58 Raïsh Ganpat, who finished 495th last season and 24th in 2018/19, while top of the pile in terms of consistency is melhorquetu, who is 297th at present and came 66th in 2019/20 and 17th in 2018/19.