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What is Daily Fantasy Soccer?

Galin Dragiev
Neal Thurman analyzes the weekend's moves that saw Romelu Lukaku move to Manchester United, Wayne Rooney move in the opposite direction and Chelsea get left out in the cold

Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) has become one of the biggest fantasy formats out there and daily fantasy Premier League, albeit fairly new, is growing at an extraordinary rate. For those you of you who haven’t heard about DFS soccer, I’ll quickly introduce the format and explain how it works. I’ll later give some tips on how to build winning lineups. First off, let’s tackle the “what”.

What is DFS?

DFS Soccer is a format for playing fantasy soccer with real money. It works like this:

  • Create an account

  • Deposit money into your account

  • Choose a league (MLS, Premier League, UEFA Champions League, etc)

  • Select a contest (There are a variety of contest types, explained later, that each cost a different amount to enter)

  • Create your team (fill all positions of your lineups without exceeding a salary cap)

  • Track your players live, and collect your earnings right away if you win

  • Repeat the next day - you can create a completely different team every time you play!


Types of Contests

  • Head to Head (H2H)– You play against one other player and the winner takes home all of the entry fees

  • 50/50 (cash game) – You play in a large league of players, where the top 50% at the end of the last match are paid double the entry fee.

  • Tournaments (Guaranteed Prize Pool aka GPP) – A large contest where the top players earn significant winnings, but generally only 5-20% of the entrants win. You can check the payout structure for each tournament before entering.

  • Qualifiers – The prize here is an entry into a much bigger tournament. For example, if there is a tournament that costs $100 to enter, there could be a $10 qualifier with 10 slots, where the first place winner wins an entry fee into the $100 tournament.

  • Multipliers – These are similar to 50/50 games, but you could double, triple, or quadruple your money.

*The websites running the contests take a percentage of all entry fees as a rake. That rake usually consists of somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the entry fee.

Buy-ins for all the formats generally ranges from Free to over $1000. Users choose how much they want to risk each time they play. Users can choose to play just one lineup per day, or they can enter multiple lineups into multiple contests.

Winning in DFS

  • Study the scoring – every website has different scoring for soccer and this makes all the difference in the world. There are websites out there that do not give any defensive points outside of clean sheets, which devalues defenders by a huge margin. Others give points for stats like blocked shots, recovered balls, passes intercepted, and tackles won, which would obviously make good defenders worth their price. Make sure you always check the scoring before you play, as it can be wildly different than what you are used to.

  • Safety in H2H and 50/50s – In these formats, your goal is to beat half of the players. The best way to tackle that is with safe players. I like playing players here who often:

    • Cross the ball

    • Shoot

    • Get fouled

Going for the clean sheet or the goals is never a bad idea, but selecting players who have a high floor due to more predictable stats like the ones I mentioned above will generally help you beat out 50% of the players even if your players don’t find the back of the net that day.

  • Upside in tournaments – Unlike in 50/50s, to win in a tournament, you need very high upside. It generally takes a few goals and clean sheets to win a tourney, so a viable strategy is to stack your team with defenders from just one team and go for expensive strikers that can score multiple goals on a given gameweek. Stacking defenders from just one team is generally cheaper and that affords you the opportunity to spend more on strikers, and if all your defenders can earn a clean sheet, you’re at a huge advantage already.

  • Use sportsbook odds – Using sportsbook odds is a great way to decide on who to play on a given week. Looking at clean sheet odds for defenders/goalkeepers and goal scoring odds for strikers can be instrumental in building good lineups. Sportsbooks do a lot more research than any of us and rely on it to make money, so they are generally spot on their predictions.

  • Bankroll Management – Don’t bet all of your money on day one. Generally, most experts recommend not using more than 20% of your bankroll in a single day. That prevents you from going bankrupt when a player inevitably gets injured or sent-off in the first five minutes.

  • Late changes – Some websites allow you to make changes up until kickoff of each match. Know how late you can make changes on your site of choice and use that to your advantage. We release all lineups here on Rotoworld as they are announced, so you have plenty of time to check them out and make changes up until kickoff.

  • Find underpriced players – Underpriced players are available on almost all websites. No one has a perfect pricing algorithm and if you do enough research, you can generally find extremely valuable players. Sadio Mane was very, very cheap for a majority of last season and won many people lots of money. He won’t be as cheap this season, but there will be others like him. Keep an eye out and do as much research as you can before each week.

That’s it for today folks. In the next two or three days, I’ll be back to discuss what our favorite websites are to play DFS soccer. There are quite a few and each has it’s strengths and weaknesses, so we’ll dive into that later. Best of luck for the new season!