Serie A Fantasy expert season review

We bring in community member @FPL_Crisk to provide you with his Serie A Fantasy expert season review. We look through what went right and what went wrong in his season, where he finished and everything else that had an impact on the success of his campaign.

Over at Fantasy Football Community we will be covering the Serie A Fantasy game next season. From top picks to expert team reveals, we will do everything to help you on your way. Crisk’s Serie A Fantasy expert season review will be the first of many pieces in the build-up to the start of the season.

Introduction

Welcome to my Serie A Fantasy expert season review. I expect this, for most people, is first season playing this version of Serie A Fantasy. As an Italian, and a Serie A fan myself, I was already knowledgeable of Italian football.

Nevertheless, the year was a great opportunity to grow as a player while at the same time understanding more and more about the mechanics of this version of the game. I ended up finishing around top 1.3K, which is satisfying considering there was 46K total players. But, I know that I could have pushed for more so the best course of actions is to relive the season, highlighting the good decisions and the mistakes that lead me here today.

First Draft and Round 1

Let’s start with my first team in Round 1. My draft was mostly made looking at price value, previous season performance and a few assumptions I had surrounding team structure. First of all I surrounded myself with big premium forwards. In FPL there are players like Salah and Son that can win the Golden Boot despite playing in midfield, but in Serie A it is usually the centre forwards that provide the undeniable majority of goals.

This later proved to be a mistake. Serie A Fantasy do not award bonus points. This leads to forwards not keeping up with the high scoring midfielders and defenders. This also leads them not to haul as much, making them less reliable captaincy options. To accommodate for the investment in attack, I tried to be smart and went budget with my midfield picks (where I was probably better off investing most of my money in).

In defence I went with double Milan (best defence the previous year) and wing-backs like Dumfries, Singo and Faraoni, who I knew could give me a bunch of returns in the form of assists. This also didn’t work out in my favour. The point system awards clean sheet points to defenders when they fully complete a half without conceding goals. Wingbacks tend to be substituted during the second half, blocking any chance of clean sheet points.

Actually, nailed on central defenders like Danilo (Juve) and Kim (Napoli) ended up amongst the best top scorers in the game. That includes ahead of all the best midfielders and forwards. I had a very slow start and, being stuck at around 13K OR after four Rounds, I decided to pull the trigger with the only Wildcard chip available.

Early Wildcard

The WC team corrected some of those mistakes. First of all money was spread more on the midfielders with premium options Milinkovic-Savic and Dybala (later also Leao would come in). In defence, Bremer and Ibanez provided a consistent source of points. While Round 5 itself was a low scoring one overall, this change in team structure proved to be successful with me ranking in the top 2K in the second and 4th Quad leader boards. In particular, round 15 was one to remember, and which underlines what I said before.

High’s and lows

Putting the armband on Parisi will probably become one of my favorite Fantasy Football moments. I was experimenting with capping defenders, and Parisi played in a fairly good defensive side. He was also playing against the worst attack in the league.

I was expecting him to be guaranteed 7-10 points. He obviously delivered and more, with a full clean sheet and a goal. We can also notice how Osimhen, despite a goal only managed to outscore Hjulmand who didn’t even get a return (lots of ball recoveries, though). Also, Dumfries, who should be on paper an amazing pick, never really delivered due to early substitutions.

One thing I regret is following fixtures more than form when planning transfers. Round 18 was my lowest point of the season. Probably the highest point average Round, and I ended up benching 47 points because I didn’t trust Osimhen, Lookman (who by this point was the most in form cheap midfielder) and Hjulmand who played against Juventus, Inter and Milan respectively. At my current rank, those points would lift me up to about 500 spots.

The period after that my decision-making progress got a bit more consistent. I started banking transfers to groups of 3-4 at a time in order to have mini-WCs in case I needed to change the team structure to accommodate the two players per team rule.

Players like Danilo, Udogie, Lookman, Kvaratskhelia, Osimhen and Dybala became staples that consistently gave me a number of points. Those points were large enough to make a steady climb up the ranks into the top 1K by GW26.

Final Rounds

The end of the season was pretty uneventful and more of the same, but with a few more lessons to be learned about the form vs fixtures dilemma. I refused to go for Lukaku despite his incredible series of returns saving my money for a Dybala comeback from injury with a great run of fixtures, which didn’t happen.

Overall, this season was a great success. I reached a satisfying rank, learnt a lot from my mistakes and I’m ready to bring all of this knowledge into next season. The MVP of my season was Dybala. He provided returns in 65% of matches whilst in my team, often with double-digit-hauls. The performance of the season came from Parisi (34 points on captaincy, R15). My Flop of the Season was Dumfries who picked up just one full clean sheet which was in Round 2).