Euro 24: Initial thoughts, fixtures and player research

With the season game coming to an end, I’m really looking forward to the shorter format game for Euro 2024. I’ve started looking at an initial lineup and mapping out fixtures while considering the new rules for the tournament. 

Point scoring looks very similar to the season game, however transfer rules have changed compared to previous International tournaments. We won’t have 30 transfers to use across the tournament, instead, each fixture round will be split into matchdays. Across the group stage, we will get 3 transfers per round, we will then get unlimited transfers before the knockout stage and then 5 transfers for the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final.  

We can also nominate a captain and vice-captain. The captain will score double points, or the vice-captain will if the captain doesn’t play. 

There are also three boosters available to us:

• Goal Bonus: each player scores 10 points for a goal and your captain scores 20.
• 12th Man: Add an additional player to your team for one matchday.
• Max Captain: Your captain is automatically the highest scoring player in your team. 

Before I go into too much detail about my own plans it’s worth pointing out that this is a much faster paced game and is very much a lottery as these international tournaments can be very unpredictable.

Given the new rules and past experience on what has worked well, here’s how I’m going to approach the game:

Fixtures

Studying the fixtures is a great starting point. If we simply start by looking at how the fixtures fall this will give us a huge advantage over other people. 

I’ve mapped out the fixtures using the spreadsheet below and I’m going to use this as the basis of my plan. The key here is game difficulty. The numbers next to each team represent where they were in the bookmaker’s odds for winning the tournament, which I thought was a good indication of how good or bad they might be.

What can we take from this? Given that we’ve only got 3 transfers between rounds, I’m seriously considering the likes of England, Germany, Portugal and Belgium as they all have relatively easy groups. France, Spain, Italy, Croatia and Netherlands have relatively tough fixtures.

I haven’t got to the stage where I’ve decided how I’ll tackle this yet but this will be the basis of my planning when it comes to picking a starting team.

Player research

Given that player pricing is very competitive for this tournament, I think finding a bargain is going to be essential. As a result, I’ve started mapping out player stats based on the past 9-10 games for each nation. It’s going to be really important to spot a bargain and for me, this is the only way to do it – based on hard evidence. There’s little point picking a random attacking midfielder who is yet to score for his country if probability suggests this isn’t the tournament when it’s going to happen. I’ll be looking for well-priced players who have been scoring or assisting over recent games to give me a better chance of success. A good example might be someone like Lukaku. He’s scored a lot of goals for Belgium recently, without this knowledge, he might have been someone that I overlooked given his previous form in such tournaments. 

I also don’t find the Dream Team website/app very useful for mapping players against each other to compare prices. I’ve placed this information in a spreadsheet to help with this. This covers the main top nations and allows me at a glance to compare the price of all defenders to try and find a bargain. As the table shows, Belgium tick the box for good fixtures and their defenders are the only ones coming in consistently under 4m. 

If I’ve highlighted players in green it means I think they might start. If they are in a brighter green they are of high interest to me. 

All of this data can be found using the link below. I’ve also included a map of the fixtures and the player data for all of the nations I’m looking at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x8FfQRwkpUdPoiZ3U-Pd69pSYkxDHX2OGqZO7fIzdww/edit?usp=sharing