Hi there. My name is Pete, and I make really bad decisions all the time.

Thankfully, most of those mistakes are confined to the world of Draft Fantasy Football, and not real life. However, I wish they didn’t happen at all frankly, and vow with the help of these blogs and verbal processing to cut them out of my game completely.

I don’t know about you, but I cannot wait for the new season of Draft Fantasy to start. Last season was AWFUL. Bad decision after bad decision saw me finish the season in dead last, a massive 19 points behind the next player above me. Not being a particularly bad fantasy player in general (I was unlucky… honest!) this came as a bit of a shock to me, so I thought over the course of this season, I could talk through some of the major errors I made last season so (hopefully) you don’t make the same mistakes as me!

Now friends, let’s rewind to the beginning of the season, way back to Gameweek 3 of the Premier League. Things had not been going my way. I had picked Payet up as my first pick, and we all know how that went. In all honesty, none of my players were really performing how they should. My second pick, Diego Costa had picked up 2 yellow cards and although he had scored twice, I made my first mistake of the season and listened to too many pundits.

As we all know, Diego Costa is not the most loved character in football, so obviously even though he was scoring, all the attention was on the fact that he was getting yellow cards, and should have been getting reds. As I said, I listened, intently and started freaking out that my player was going to get banned, he would stop scoring goals and I would continue to do badly.

Only one of those statements turned out to be true; I did continue to do badly.
Costa didn’t get banned. He even stopped getting so many yellow cards. The only issue is, by then he wasn’t my player anymore.

Mistake #1. Don’t Trade Out Your Marquee Players.

Everyone starts on a relatively even level in Draft Fantasy. The first 2 or 3 picks you make tend to be very good players; players who, unless they get injured should continue to get regular points throughout the season (unless they are Payet. I’m not bitter… honest…). My mistake Ladies and Gentlemen was to trade out Diego Costa. I panicked because I was desperate. I panicked because I wasn’t patient, and forgot the season was 38 weeks long, not 3.

I traded out Diego Costa. I traded him out for none other than Wilfred Bony (along with 3 other players, but let’s be honest, I started the trade with Costa and finished it with Bony). Even with hindsight this decision baffles me. Diego Costa finished the season as the 3rd highest scoring striker in the league. Diego Costa finished the season with 20 goals and 11 assists. Bony on the other hand? 2 goals, 0 assists.
It got so bad I even offered my friend money to reverse. I was distraught. This is not an official mistake, but please don’t offer money for trades. It’s embarrassing and you will never live it down as I am learning!

No matter how bad it seems at the time, no matter how desperate you are, hold on to your best players for as long as you can, unless it’s for another ‘marquee’ player to use an MLS term. These are the guys who will get you those necessary points week in, week out, and could be the difference between winning and losing in those really tight gameweeks.

Don’t be like me and panic when you hear the pundits grumbling on TV. You picked that player because you know what they are capable of. Just wait, and enjoy that 30-yard screamer they’ll score in a few weeks.

So, that was my first mistake. Believe me, there are many more where that came from. Stay tuned for next week to hear the next. It wasn’t all bad. At least I still had Payet…