TFF is back for 25/26!
So the Telegraph Fantasy Football, and here are our Telegraph fantasy football tips. TFF is one of the original games that I used to play when I was younger. While not as popular as the FPL or The Sun, it is unique and I do enjoy playing it.
What are Telegraph fantasy football tips?
I have always enjoyed playing the Telegraph Fantasy Football. It’s really easy to play and it has a simple user interface when picking your team. No subs, no chips, no dynamic player prices, just picking a team and seeing how it gets on and making minimal changes each week with a maximum transfers a season.
In the 24/25 season I came in the top 30k, which could have been better, but I made so fatal mistakes with hanging onto Man City players while they were going through their rough patch.
25/26 TFF Changes
This season we will be seeing some changes with the Telegraph Fantasy Football, the good news I can’t see them changing our approach drastically.
Firstly, we are getting another 5 transfers. The usual strategy across the course of the season with transfers is one a week saving the rest for a crisis like injuries, suspensions or if you need to gut a team out. Last season I got to the final couple of weeks with 2 transfers, so another 5 is going to help.
Secondly, the Carabao Cup is now counting towards points, so that means all domestic cups accounted for in points. This now needs to be consideration at the start of the season when looking at the fixtures. While I will not basing my fixture difficult on the Carabao Cup, I will be using it as a tie breaker between two players.
Telegraph fantasy football tips and Strategy
So let’s take a look at what we have to do to be competitive at the top of TFF. Firstly last year the winner won with 2229 points, obviously we can’t just aim for that as the game modernises. This year we have the League points involved, I’m not sure how this is going to effect things.
My initial thought is to take 2229 and a tolerance of 10% which makes 2452. The reason I did this was to give us room if things do not pan out as we expect. There are ten game months, so to stay on track we need 246 points per game month.
On average you are looking at 62 points a game week. This means that we need to have all of our 11 players starting (2pts each), 6 clean sheets or goals (5 points each), 3 assists (3 points each) and then two saves from a goal keeper (1 point per 2 saves). It sounds great at this point, but this is just idealism.
Our next step is to develop a model to assess fixtures and win rate, then a model to select players from those teams.
Tools
So I have a few models that I have used in the past, but two are more prominent when it comes to telegraph fantasy football tips. One is the PDSC (Possession, Duelling, Scoring and Creation) model, and the other is PER (Player Efficiency Rating) model.
The PDSC model is something I have put together based on the theories of win rates. I have then created this for individual players to give a good idea of which players are best at certain roles. It uses between 30 and 40 different metrics for each player to give a more accurate insight. I use this for recruitment and performance analysis purposes mainly, but have noticed that it responds well to Fantasy Football.
The PER is designed directly for Fantasy Football. It assesses every player based on the various points scored and their supporting metrics. This was developed mid season and has had great success in picking players for Telegraph fantasy football tips.
While picking players are fun we need to look at the fixtures for each team and assess where they most effective, so again we calculate through another model. This model takes the strength of each team in various metrics and gives us a various strength level. This in turn indicates where cleans sheets and goals are most likely.
As for transfers we need to be thinking ahead and each team will get a rating of their next five fixtures. This then indicates when a player of a certain team needs to come in and when a player needs to get out. Call it a miniature SWOT analysis.
Conclusion
So there we have it, this is the plan I have set out for the season, but please do not be fooled into thinking that this is in the bag. There are a number of variables which can happen each week. Quick disclaimer, this is the plan of how we play the TFF and I’m glad you have enjoyed our Telegraph Fantasy Football Tips, but things are likely to change as the season progresses.
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