This season could be about having Haarland in the team, but if everyone plumps for him, that will cancel out his value .
Most people have got him now, and Jesus. And its an incredibly competitive fantasy football season so far, with fewer obvious routes to gaining a clear advantage.
Up till now, choosing to captain Haaland has been one way to still get an advantage out of him, but thats already much less of a differential option, and will probably become even less so now that some people got burned captaining Salah this week.
I had a really bad start to the season and I've only managed to claw my way back, fairly slowly, via Mitrovic and Sanchez in goal, and stuff like captaining Haaland last week. I tried various other ways to be different too, but with only modest gains. Midfield differentials havent done anything for me yet. Betting against going full on big at the back with all the most glamorous names there and going without defensive double-ups such as double Liverpool, double Chelsea or double Man City has also helped me some weeks. This week was one of those, some well known fantasy football managers ended up with less points from their 4 or 5 big name defenders combined this week than I got out of Trippier alone.
We'll need some injuries, changes to which teams have the best upcoming fixtures on paper, some more obvious things to do with the money if considering selling Salah, and people taking risks out of boredom or desperation, if we are to escape the dull template. Even if we dont escape that there will still be enough variation each week via a few other slots in our team that means there will gradually still be plenty of changes to our individual fortunes and ranks, but it will be quite the slog.
It already feels quite a bit different to most seasons I've played, far more people have stuck mostly to the same obvious options than they used to, and it was easier to afford a team mostly filled with players from the big clubs. And not too many points separate many millions of places in overall rank. Its not currently possible to already expect to be in or around the top 1 million if doing ok this time, unlike other seasons where this could mostly be taken for granted once the opening half a dozen or so weeks were out of the way. I've had to adjust my overall rank expectations in a big way. And there are millions more people playing than there used to be, and far more info available on the internet about which moves it is sensible to make. Usually millions of people eventually lose interest and stop playing properly after a while, but I dont know to what extent that will actually happen this time, will be interesting finding out.