Thanks to WR setting up a fantasy soccer signup sheet over the weekend, I thought 
I'd write a brief write-up on the league settings and scoring. A lot of this has yet to be determined, but here's a basic rundown, aimed primarily at those folks who haven't played fantasy soccer before.
Let's have it:
League of Play - Barclays Premiership (England) - TBD
The English Premier League is perhaps the most watched sports league in the world, with hundreds of millions of viewers across the globe. Seeing how we have a large contingent from the UK and because English is the primary language, we'll base the league player pool off of England, where some of today's superstars in world football, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Cesc Fabregas, Frank Lampard, and Fernando Torres play.
For those of you who are comfortable playing other fantasy soccer leagues (yours truly is a master of Spain and had his best campaign ever in Italy this past year), Ole Ole has a game called the European Superleague, which is basically the equivalent of fantasy baseball's mixed leagues (AL/NL), but the difference is there's 5 leagues rolled into one: England, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany, all of which comprising the 5 power leagues of European club football/soccer. If the most of you vote for this option, we'll go with it. Here's the page:
League Site: Official Premiership site (fantasy.premierleague.com)
Arguably, the most beginner-friendly game belongs to the official site of the English Premier League. It has features such as weekly fantasy advice columns and statistics on which players are owned percentage-wise, just to name a few. The Fantasy Premier League is like most fantasy soccer games, which are salary cap based point leagues where the aim is for your team to keep accumulating points and make a march on the standings. Because private and public leagues can fit as many as 40 teams, it's possible to build your team around the same players as your opponents, but the premise is the same: to build your team within the salary cap, find bargain values, make the right transfers, and coming up with the best strategy to squeeze the most points weekly.
League Option: London Times PlayTheGame (playthegame.timesonline.co.uk)
Last season, I happened to find the London Times' PlayTheGame, which gives an Americanized take on fantasy soccer: a conventional redraft roto league. Here, everyone has their own unique rosters, according to the draft, and trades can be made with a veto system in place. There are 6 offensive and 6 defensive categories to gain points in, which puts greater weight on balancing out the make-up of your team, especially if you're in a 20-team league, which I actually participated in this past campaign.
The major drawback here is that the game is autodraft-only and is based off on some rather lousy pre-rankings. For example, Carlos Tevez and Fernando Torres, two of the best strikers in the game, were ranked relatively low, and this caused me to rank them higher (both in fact landed in my top 20). This resulted in my fantasy team being first in 5 of the 6 categories (2nd in Average Goals For) because I wound up having Cristiano Ronaldo, Tevez, Torres, and Emmanuel Adebayor (three of which scored no less than 24 goals). As a consequence, the computer drafted a piss-poor defense for me and despite being so fully loaded offensively, I'd ultimately finish 3rd out of 20 teams because of it.
Player selection: In most fantasy soccer games, you're given a 100 million pound budget (or dollar if you want to think of it that way) from which you select an 11-man starting lineup. In the Fantasy Premier League game, you're also adding a 4-man bench. With players' salaries in mind, you build your team while trying to stay under the 100m cap.
Each week, you can decide to replace and sign players while managing again to stay under the cap. The most common transaction is to replace a highly paid player carrying some dead money to some extent for a bargain player that's outproducing the former. So, say you have a 7.5 million pound player that has underperformed and you want to replace him for a player that's scoring plenty of points for a fraction of the price (let's say 1.5 million less). In doing such a transaction, you can free up funds to upgrade the positions or points you're in dire need of. Position scarcity also plays a factor into your selection strategy, just like with fantasy baseball.
The caveat with weekly transfers is if you make more than one transfer that week, you are penalized 4 points off of the next week's total for each transfer. You are gifted a wild card transfer, in which you can make an unlimited number of transfers for one week without incurring a penalty, best used for emergencies should your team be struggling with injuries, suspensions, or even a player transferred out of the league. However, you're only given one of those wild card transfers and you'll have to use it wisely.
Scoring: In the context of Fantasy Premier League, if I remember right, you would get 5 points for a goal, 3 for an assist, 1 for a start with the player going 60 minutes or over in the game, 3 points for a save, and 6 for a clean sheet for a defender/goalkeeper. You can also get negative points for a yellow card, red card, or a goal allowed by your keeper.
Fantasy Premier League also has a scoring kink added to the mix. If you make a certain player your captain for the week, you're doubling his points. This is a great boon for you if your captain pulls in a big day. So, if Cristiano Ronaldo bagged a hat trick, you're looking at approximately 16 points and doubled that for 32, which could be huge in leapfrogging over your opponents in the standings.
How long is the season? There are 38 gameweeks in the league, with all 20 teams playing 38 games. Every week feels a lot like the fantasy NFL football campaign where every Saturday/Sunday feels like something of a sacred event, but instead of it being 15 weeks long, fantasy soccer is a 38 week marathon, starting from this coming August until next May.
If you're curious about what this whole madness is all about, feel free to register and try something completely different:
If you do register, I encourage that we discuss the league format, but I'm fairly sure that Fantasy Premier League is the best route to go.
-Ray
thought i would just toss that out there.
here
I play that too, but I'm not crazy about Yahoo's, even if it's a little more challenging.
One thing I like exploiting with Yahoo's game is that newly transferred players are dirt cheap to own. For example, when Fernando Torres transferred from Atletico Madrid to Liverpool, he only cost under 6m pounds. A striker of his quality should go for about 18m. So, I never had to transfer him, got 24 goals out of him by season's end and could shell out the cash I wanted on Cristiano Ronaldo.
One thing I hate about Yahoo's game is if a bargain doesn't pan out for you, well, you're stuck with him. I thought Kieran Richardson (who transferred from Man Utd to Sunderland to play for Roy Keane) could be good for any bargain (he costs like under 2m) seeing how he would get more playing time, but that didn't materialize and the most I got out of him was negative points. Kieran Richardson, blah.
I am going to get beat badly, very badly, no matter what format we play in.
these player names you keep tossing out, are all Yiddish to me.
Oh, I almost forgot, if you try to sell a player on Yahoo, there's a selling fee. So, say your player has risen from 5m to 11m in value. You can't sell him for the full 11, it would be more like 6 or 7m, and really you're not making any profit.
There's a selling fee in the Fantasy Premier League game too, but it's more manageable I'd say. So, if you have a player that costs 7.5m but was now valued at 8.5m, you can still sell him for say, 8.2m and make some change off of it.
so they are all salary cap type games, except for the one that auto-drafts for you
Yes, all salary cap. PlayTheGame was the only fantasy soccer I found that's draft-based, but I hope in due time, they would do live drafts.