GameDay Squad Football Round 4 review

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

Unlike the previous round, this round saw plenty of clean sheets as ten teams kept them. This meant poor selection of defenders and goalkeepers blew your round to bits. This week’s top ten was filled with unusual suspects, making point of differences the way to go. Erling Haaland led the way with 30.5, as Trippier (30.25), Semenyo (29), Doku (28), Roefs (27.25), Zubimendi (27), Madueke (24.5), Romero (23.5), Minteh (22), Bergvall (22) and Caicedo (22) rounded it out.

This week’s top 10 consisted of five forwards, two defenders, two midfielders and one goalkeeper. This meant there were plenty of attacking options to choose from with popular picks Haaland and Semenyo providing the goods.

The new discussion points… erm we’ll call them my thoughts this week, as while pretty self explanatory, it’s worth going over. This round's thoughts are; stacking up on one team and the low block.

As someone who likes to minimize risk when creating squads, stacking up on multiple players from one club isn’t usually on my to do list. However, there seems to be a benefit to doing so for defenders. It makes sense, if a clean sheet is kept then all a team's defenders (who play the entire game) and their goalkeeper will get you a minimum 8 (defenders with +2 from minutes) or 10 points (gk with +2 from minutes). If you nail the correct game it can sort the majority of your defence in one game, but the downside of course being you can very easily screw your entire round. While it is a risky play that can pay off, the other factor that convinces me to avoid doing so is that being subbed out takes away this clean sheet bonus. You may argue a reasonable score could still occur even without this bonus, and that is true, however at least part of the time clean sheets may also come against inferior teams with little to no attacking threat (I.e. Burnley v Liverpool), making it all the harder to accumulate defensive stats. I feel much more comfortable diversifying the teams in my defence and picking based on underlying stats against teams who typically concede them (I.e. van Dijk against teams who concede aerial duel wins).

We spoke of the Burnley v Liverpool game, which is an excellent example of a low block. Now, while there was only a single goal in this game we still saw some significant scores (Wirtz [13] and Gakpo [12]) from other Liverpool attackers, most of which were created from the opposition playing this gamestyle. Burnley allowed 21 key passes (league average is 8.26), 13 successful dribbles (6.58) and 10 accurate crosses (4.31), which are usually key stats for attacking players' scoring output. A small sample space from just this game, but a trend likely to continue given the space that is created and the time in attacking half in these types of games. So what does this mean? It likely changes our strategies very minimally, as you’re likely already targeting and picking attackers from superior teams against inferior opposition, however you do so knowing that regardless of if the low block is broken down, most of the attacking players should still score well.

…and that’s a wrap for the round! Good luck!