GameDay Squad Football Round 2 review

Welcome to the Round Two review for GameDay Squad’s Football Platform. In these reviews we’ll examine how the round went, who scored well and the talking points.

What an absolutely fantastic way to end the round. I mean who doesn’t love a last minute winner from Liverpool?

In a somewhat disappointing round, the late last minute withdrawal of Cole Palmer (injured in the warm up) caused a lot of havoc for coaches. Additionally, popular options such as Ait-Nouri (0.5), Haaland (4), Reijnders (3), Odegaard (3) and Murillo (-1.25) disappointed, albeit several came off injured.

This week’s top 10 (11 players as ties for 10th) consisted of one goalkeeper, two defenders, four midfielders and four forwards. The standout goalkeeper in Pickford racked in a huge score of 31.5 after keeping a clean sheet and saving a penalty. While this week’s top scoring defenders (Timber and Calafiori) put doubt on the aerial duel impact in scoring, as both counted on goals and/or assists to impact their scores rather than duels.

The major discussion points from the round included; goalkeeper selection, favourable fixtures and fading the big names.

Finding the correct goalkeepers from week to week appears to be a crucial way to access “easy” points. With the boosted positional points for clean sheets and almost guaranteed full game (requirement for clean sheets), picking a goalkeeper that will keep one will result in ten points from just that. While it is an easy way to gain points, it’s just as simple to lose them- thus, creating a decent gap between coaches who nail their picks. The lack of a clean sheet immediately reduces a keepers score by 2 (so you’re essentially 12 points behind) , and makes it hard for goalkeepers to gain points from there with saves (+2) being the most typical way, while high claims and punches typically are few and far between. This is even more of a problem if the favoured team in the matchup concedes. While picking based on the fixture makes the most sense, it is also fraught with danger because of the lack of opportunity for saves.

Favourable fixtures do appear to be the way to go in GDS, as the scoring system has created a much larger pool of players who are capable of scoring well. The bigger name mainstays in teams have already proved, in the opening two rounds, that in difficult fixtures it is probably worth avoiding, purely because there will be other options that can score similarly to top players when the conditions are right. This does mean fading the big names should be and will be more common on this platform.

While fading the big names with poor fixtures, particularly in this round, has likely resulted in great scoring for coaches, it appears that it is currently mostly happening for those who don’t have stocked out clubs (very typical for a brand new platform) and are therefore involuntarily fading these players and selecting what is available to them. I’d say at least seven of the top ten scoring players this week were non-popular players (Timber, Anthony, Grealish, Cullen, Calafiori, Paqueta and Garner), demonstrating the depth of the playable pool of players. This is a trend in selection that I think will now catch on with most coaches, even those with stocked out clubs. It does mean that we’re likely to see variety in the top ranked coaches week to week creating both an accessible way for new coaches to access prizes and more competitive overall leaderboards throughout the season.

…and that’s a wrap for the round! How did you score? Who were your best picks? Let us know below in the comments.