The 3 Key Selection Steps

The knock-out stages of the Champions League get under way this week and that is great news for daily fantasy football fans as it will allow them to build line-ups featuring the best players on the planet, while competing for mouth-watering prizes.

DraftKings have some terrific contests available this week, including a $1,000 UK Free to Enter contest, so we’re going to walk you through the 3 key steps needed to pick a goalkeeper for one of their tournaments.

Fixture Severity

As always, we recommend that you start by assessing how difficult each fixture is, so that you can calculate the realistic chances of a goalkeeper keeping a clean sheet.

It’s worth noting that DraftKings award a 5 points bonus for any shot-stopper that finishes on the winning side.

Positional Comparison & Scoring Breakdown

Since you are given a budget from which to select your squad it’s imperative that you get a clear picture of how goalkeepers stack up against other playing positions in terms of fantasy points per game (FPPG) potential. Simply focusing on the 10 best performing players for each category should give you a good indication.

It’s also important to understand the significance of the scoring criteria for goalkeepers in general. Try to gauge exactly what percentage of their total points are likely to be accumulated from saves, win bonuses, clean sheets and so on.

Kevin Trapp of PSG fared best in the group stage, recording 5 clean sheets as well as finishing on the winning side 4 times, effectively meaning that over 29% of the points he accumulated were as a result of clean sheets while the win bonus accounted for over 23% of his points haul.

Allocating the Budget

On DraftKings you only have $50,000 from which to construct your 11-man line-up. This equates to $4,545 per pick. For this particular contest all the other playing positions appear to have much more upside so it might be worth looking for a low-cost goalkeeper option to free up more of your funds to spend elsewhere. Gent keeper Matz Sels played every minute of the knockout stage, recording a WhoScored rating of 7.19 in the process. He earned more fantasy points per game than Benfica stopper Julio César, who is priced $500 higher here, and it might just be worth taking a chance on him, rather than going for the more obvious candidates who have greater clean sheet possibilities.

Repeat this process for every contest you enter, regardless of operator, and you will soon get a feel for where you should be spending the biggest part of your budget.

Selection: Matz Sels – $3,300 on DraftKings (vs Wolfburg, $50K Budget) in their $1,000 UK Champions League Freeroll Contest