If you’re reading this, you probably already play some sort of fantasy football game.
You’ve probably read our JOE vs The Readers previews, and you probably play some kind of season-long fantasy league. Or at least you did, until you gave up midway through the season after missing the boat on Odion Ighalo and not having enough budget for Mesut Ozil.
You’re less likely to have played a Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) contest, but they’re becoming more common – and are better for those who tend to get sick of having to take wilder and more outrageous gambles to try to lift your team back up the table. We tried making Theo Walcott our captain one week, for God’s sake.
DraftKings is one of the biggest DFS platforms in the world, and has offered seven-figure prizes for its American Football contests across the pond. Now they’re coming to the UK, and that means Premier League football.
DraftKings let you pick an entire new team for each matchday, keeping within budget, and player values are based on their form up to that point. That means if a £20m player is going through a bad spell (not naming names, Memphis), they’ll be cheaper than an unproven youngster in a rich vein of form. Oh, and you don’t get docked points for changes – ditch all 11 players from one week to the next if you feel like it.
But the most important thing is you can compete in standalone games for each matchday, often with cash prizes, with transfer deadlines running until just one minute before the early kick-off. That means even if you’ve been doing dismally all season you can still win, as each round of matches brings a brand new contest to enter. You can play against the general public or against mates in private contests, while there will even be a chance to prove yourself to be smarter than us here at JOE.co.uk (and God knows you’ve already done that a few times) by taking us on in DFS contests.
Scoring works differently too – it’s not just goals, assists, clean sheets and saves. DraftKings uses a wide range of stats including to ensure points aren’t weighted too heavily towards strikers, creative midfielders and attacking full-backs.
The basics of Premier League football contests at DraftKings
- You have a $50,000 budget to pick a team of 11 players
- Everyone picks 1 goalkeeper, 3 defenders, 3 midfielders and 2 strikers
- Your remaining two players are ‘utility’ players, meaning they can be outfield players in any position. This allows you to adapt your team to whichever fixtures and players seem likely to bring the most points.
- It’s not always just the winner who can win a cash prize. Prize pools are determined before the contest begins and will always run just so long as they are marked as ‘Guaranteed’. ‘Non-Guaranteed’ contests will only go ahead if the contest fills.
- You can track your progress in real-time to see how you’re getting on in your contest
- When all the games are finished that’s it…until next week when you enter a new contest with a brand new team.
Just to get things started, we’ve given you a starting XI for this Saturday’s games. You can find it here.
