For transparency, I just wanted to publish a short blog outlining my approach for all 5 of the available teams. My number one focus is on my blog team, with 30 transfers across the tournament that team will pretty much get all of my focus and I won’t be documenting my other 4 teams. However, I will experiment with the other 4 teams to keep things interesting, although I’ll probably quickly lose interest in these if they don’t get off to a flying start.
A big concern with my blog team is that I won’t be able to go for a full defensive block. I just think it’s too risky – pick the wrong team and it could be game over very quickly. However, it’s something I’m certainly going to explore with my additional teams.
Here’s how I’m going to approach the game with 5 teams:
Team 1: Blog team
This is the team I’ll document on here and with real time updates via WhatsApp. I’m publishing all of my thoughts about that team in a separate thread so I won’t go into detail here. However, broadly speaking my strategy for this team is a partial defensive block of players from Argentina to start the tournament and then using my transfers to rotate around the potential big hitters for the rest of the group stage.
Team 2: Aggressive defensive block
I can see a lot of points being picked up from clean sheets in the group stage. As a result, I’m going very gung ho with this team. I’ll start with a fully English defensive block, then after one game I’ll switch it to Argentinian and then after that, I’ll use more transfers to make it a Brazilian defensive block. This could cost me up to 10 transfers within the first round of fixtures, however, if each team gets a clean sheet and I have a bit of luck from my attacking players, the team could get off to an absolute flyer on the leaderboard. Once the first round of fixtures are done, I’ll probably stick with the Brazilian defenders and then ride my luck with some aggressive transfers for attacking players during the rest of the group stage.
Team 3: Argentina/Brazil
For my third team, I’m going to get as many Argentina players in as I can for their opening game. I can see them going far in the tournament so if they start well, this team could make a good start. I’ll then ship some of these players out for Brazil players and keep switching between them until the group stage is over.
Team 4: France
My fourth team will be a French defensive block and I’ll probably start with their big three up front. I’ll then fill in the midfield with a few punts of cheaper options for other teams as I can’t imagine I’ll have much budget left.
Team 5:
My fifth team will be similar to my main team but I’ll go for players who didn’t quite make my main team. For example, if I start with Shaw, I will go for Trippier in this team. The team is likely to include players like Dumfries, Di Maria, and a punt on someone like Bellingham. I’ll probably then look to turn it into a defensive block after the first few fixtures.
Can we see the England block defence team you have set up?
At the moment it’s:
Pickford
Trippier
Shaw
Stones
Maguire
Sterling
Foden
De Jong
Olsen
Kane
Gakpo
So is the idea after the England game to change out the whole backline foden and sterling? Or is that using too many subs
Yeah I’ll be swapping the whole backline and then I’ll probably do it again, all within the first round of fixtures. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’ve only got 1 team because I might use all of my transfers in the group stage. It’s just an experimental team.