Many fantasy football games these days have automatic substitutions built into their system – but what exactly are these and how do they work in practice?

If you are playing a fantasy game where you pick a whole squad rather than just a team of 11 players, it is quite likely that you will have to consider automatic subs.

How these work is that if one of your players is not selected for whatever reason, it means one of your substitutes will be promoted into the XI.

One of the benefits of automatic substitutions is it means there is no need to wait until clubs have named their teams before finalising your selections, as you have a built-in back-up plan.

Lots of fantasy football players will use very cheap footballers as their automatic substitution options, as this means there is more budget to spend on those players named in their teams.

However, it can often be a good idea to have at least one reliable point-scorer on the bench so that if one of your key men does not feature, your hopes of leaderboard glory are not all lost.

Sometimes you can set the order your automatic substitutions will be used in, for example you might want a striker to be brought into the team before a defender, but the changes must still fit in with the formation rules of your chosen fantasy football game.

As an example, if your team is set up in a 3-4-3 formation and one of your defenders does not play, you would not be able to add another attacker to the team through automatic substitutes.

The official Fantasy Premier League seasonal fantasy football game is among the websites where automatic substitutes are a key part of team selection, while many of the daily fantasy football games on the market also use them to some degree.

Automatic Substitutions are a game format feature at FantasyBet