Last season’s Beta of the Ultimate Fantasy Premier League (UFPL) gave us the opportunity to explore the game and come to conclusions on the strategies that worked. I was lucky enough to win that Beta and, along the way, I learned a few things and came to a series of conclusions on how best to go about managing a UFPL squad.

With the new season just over a fortnight away, I thought I’d take time out to provide you with my guide to the game, along with a number of strategies that worked out for me.

The Scoring System

While goals, assists and clean sheets remain the mainstays of the UFPL scoring system, the games’ tentacles stretch into previously-unexplored areas, adding that little bit more depth and strategic thinking. A good thing.

Bonus points are also out of the equation – arguably, another major plus. Even so, many of the actions that contribute to the FPL’s Bonus Point System (BPS) are also present as scoring factors in UFPL.

Players will gain points for accumulating Clearances, Blocks and Interceptions (CBI), while Key Passes (passes that lead to efforts on goal) also play a part, as do Recoveries, Big Chances Created and Successful Crosses. On the flipside, each Big Chance Missed subtracts a point from a player’s total, penalising those players guilty of wasting gilt-edged opportunities.

All these new variables should be a factor in your selection, altering the profile of your likely targets somewhat. We don’t have to be radical in our change of thinking, although in defence, we can see dominant centre-backs from mid-table and relegation-threatened sides earning their keep through defensive actions via CBI. The likes of Ryan Shawcross, Steven Caulker and Curtis Davies were CBI magnets, regularly supplementing their clean sheet and goal prospects with a point via defensive work.

Similarly, creative players can earn rewards by providing key passes – while they need three in a match to earn a point, if any of these are “Big Chances Created” an extra point is thrown into the mix. With successful crosses also a factor, we should not only target the obvious playmakers such as David Silva and Mesut Ozil, but also mid-price creators such as Robert Snodgrass – a prolific supplier of crosses and key passes even at relegated Norwich.

Building the Squad

With 25 slots to fill, the possibilities and configurations are almost endless. At first glance, the £160 million budget will stretch to an array of heavy hitters but, as the funds drain, you’ll inevitably find yourself turning to budget buys to fill the gaps.

Your actual distribution of funds can mirror your decisions from the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game, with an impetus on spending big up front, whilst preserving cash in goal and defence – relying on budget stoppers to reap points through attacking points and CBI.

With up to four players permitted from each club, UFPL lends itself to heavily backing the fortunes of specific teams – my squad was stacked towards Man City, Liverpool and Everton and that certainly paid dividends. There are some factors that influence how you spread your squad, however, and we’ll cover that when we look at the fixtures.

The fact that you will have seven non-playing reserves each week has to be considered with the initial squad selection. I found that it was almost the same seven players that were frozen out of my 18-man matchday squad each week – suggesting that opting for bench fodder in these roles is a viable tactic.

With seven bench players at your disposal to swap in and out during a Gameweek, I also found that I could take risks with some selections and opt for players that, traditionally, are seen as luxuries due to a lack of security of start. The likes of Aleks Kolarov, Hatem Ben Arfa, Edin Dzeko, Danny Welbeck and Oscar all worked well in this respect, particularly when they played on a Saturday, with the option to swap them out. Such players are too risky as selections in FPL but, in Ultimate, you could use your bench to sub them out should they fail to either record minutes or pick up points.

The Fixtures

Given that your squad is settled for the duration of the season, it’s easy to dismiss the fixtures list as a big factor in selection. That’s far from the truth.

While the pattern of opposition isn’t a key factor in your plans, the spread of fixtures across the Gameweek certainly is.

You have to try and maximise your coverage across the Saturday/Sunday/Monday fixtures because this gives you greater flexibility with your chosen 18-man matchday squad in each Gameweek. Players who don’t perform on Saturday can be swapped for those yet to play on Sunday and Monday, but only if you ensure that you give yourself options. If you’ve just a couple of players involved on Sunday, you’re forcing yourself to get your Saturday selection spot on. Equally, if your squad is biased towards those sides playing Sunday, you’ll be stuck with a limited XI for Saturday, with a big dependency on the following day’s matches.

Ideally, you’ll have a starting XI for Saturday, along with seven options to bring on from the bench on Sunday; this offers the very best chance of achieving a strong haul through substitutions over the course of the Gameweek.

Look for clubs that are in Champions League and Europa League action, or that are likely to be featured on TV frequently. So that’s Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea in the top price brackets, along with Everton, Tottenham and Hull City when it comes to mid-price assets. All these teams will be assured of Sunday/Monday matches if they progress in Europe. However, while you should target them, make sure your squad is evenly split between these seven and the remaining 13 sides to give you the best chance of covering the two or three days of any given Gameweek.

Target your big spend on those teams most likely to play Sunday, using the other 13 sides to supply budget and mid-price assets. You can take a risk on budget players for Saturday’s matches knowing that, if they perform you can leave them in your XI but, if they let you down (which they often will), you’ve got heavy hitters coming off the bench for Sunday and Monday. This allows you to get the most from your budget and mid-price selections.

The Armband

The captaincy remains a crucial weapon in your quest for a big Gameweek points haul. The difference with UFPL, of course, is that you can switch the armband across the Saturday, Sunday and Monday fixtures.

Again then, it pays to give yourself options over the course of the Gameweek so, if your Saturday skipper flops, you have a couple of other candidates waiting in the wings on Sunday or Monday night.

While this is a luxury, it also poses the question on Sunday morning – do you stick or twist? The threshold for switching captains is debatable but I found that I was reluctant to gamble if my Saturday captain scored eight points. Less than that and, depending on the quality of the replacements, I was willing to twist.

The armband is also a big factor when it comes to considering loan signings. We’ll look at that shortly.

Gameweek Management

At this point, it’s important to stress that UFPL creates an “all or nothing” scenario when it comes to managing your squad within a Gameweek. Once you make a single change from your bench, or even re-assign the armband, the auto-substitution facility and vice-captain fallback will not come to your aid.

In other words, you will only benefit from auto-subs if you leave your Saturday lineup in place and do nothing over the course of the Gameweek. Sit idle and the game will switch in players from your bench to replace those who failed to play a single minute and it will use your bench order to bring in those replacements, keeping your team in a valid formation. If, however, you do any tinkering eg: you make a sub on Saturday night for Sunday’s matches, the auto-subs will not compensate for any missing players for that Gameweek. It will be down to you to manage the squad for the entirety of the Gameweek, without assistance.

The Transfer Windows

It’s difficult to assess how the Transfer Windows should be used because, in the Beta, only one was really enforced and, up to that point, we had unlimited transfers with which to tinker.

For the this season, UFPL is giving us the opportunity to make transfers over the first three Gameweeks, before the transfer window slams shut, limiting your tinkering to emergency loans (more on those in a bit). Once the season starts you have 15 trades with which to react to form and the early lineups. Whilst that’s not a wildcard, it does allow you to make wholesale changes and, according to the rules, while you can only make up to 5 transfer per Gameweek, unused transfers will roll-over across the first three Gameweeks until the window closes.

Once Gameweek 3 has passed, your squad is locked in and your next opportunity to make transfers arrives in January. This gives us another 12 trades over a period of four Gameweeks in the winter transfer window. Again we have restrictions here, with only three transfers permitted per Gameweek but, again, they do roll-over. A popular tactic here may well be to bank transfers until the actual Premier League transfer window closes on January 31 – when the new arrivals will all be in place.

With these two spells of transfers, the season is clearly broken up into two distinct blocks. As a result, you should use the fixture schedule to plan your strategy, focusing on those teams with the kindest fixtures up until the January window, in the knowledge that you can, to some extent, re-work your squad in the New Year.

The Loan System

Between transfer windows, your squad tinkering is limited to “emergency loans” – temporary “transfers” that come packaged with a points penalty.

The system is geared towards long-term deals, with loans costing four points for a single Gameweek and up to 10 points for four.

While that makes longer loan spells more appealing, the key factor to consider is that you can only have one “set” of loan deals in place at a time. Sign a player for four Gameweeks and you won’t be able to carry out another loan until this spell is over or the loan is cancelled (accruing the full points cost).

At a glance, the penalties for loan deals look minor and suggest that playing the loan system could be profitable. While this can be the case when you suffer a long-term injury to a significant squad member, you need to be wary of using loans to react to every casualty or form bandwagon. You have a squad of 25 and, more often than not, this can absorb injuries and loss of form.

Having said that, when you couple a loan signing with a run of kind fixtures and you can be certain of having the option of handing the player the armband, a tactical loan could pay dividends. Factors have to align to make this worthwhile and, even then, you’re taking a gamble. In many ways, the loan system is a method of seeking and finding a differential and, as such, it can be a useful weapon.

To conclude, I can only hope that this guide helped to outline some of the key differences between UFPL and it’s counterpart, whilst also giving you some guidance on the strategies to consider.

I plan to follow this up with further articles before the season kick-off. I’ll focus on the player list to consider how our targets shift a little from our FPL thinking when selecting a 25-man UFPL squad.

About Ultimate Fantasy Premier League

Costing £5 entry per team, the UFPL is a squad-based game that offers a cool £25,000 winner’s prize and a monthly prize of £1,000. For those unfamiliar, we’re essentially handed a budget of £160m to build our 25-man squads but, for each Gameweek, can only select an 18-man squad, leaving seven of our squad out in the cold.

The UFPL favours the more hands-on approach and affords us a “stick or twist” dilemma for every day of the Gameweek, which allows us the option of replacing poor performers with options off the bench – a concept familiar with those who played the FIFA McDonald’s World Cup 2014 or the UEFA Champions League games.

The Fantasy Football Scout UFPL League

For those who are looking to get involved or have already began to tinker with their first drafts, you can join the official Fantasy Football Scout league: the code is 524-87.