It hasn’t taken long for the first big injury news to hit 2009 fantasy teams… it’s barely even November 2008! Matthew Egan is now considering retirement after getting bad news from a specialist in Sydney about the foot he broke in round 22 of 2007. (more…)

I’ve been assuming for the purposes of the Fanplanner feature on FanFooty that draftees and rookies playing their first game of senior AFL football are going to score 50 fantasy points… let’s look at some historical data to see if that’s true. (more…)

As Barack Obama prepares to take over as the next US President from George W. Bush, there are a few more power shifts on the minds of fantasy coaches this off-season, with older players looking like they will give up their spots in the senior 22 to younger upstarts… with a few at the Power! (more…)

With around 260 full squads entered into the Fanplanner feature by coaches planning their 2009 Dream Team and Super Coach teams, many trends are becoming apparent, with one of them being that certain “premiums” - high-priced players who are either in or just outside the top 10 for their position - are on the nose with the vast majority of coaches. (more…)

This is something I’ve been working on for a while now, and thinking about for even longer. FanFooty Guru is a set of numbers published for each round of the AFL home & away system giving a prediction of each selected player’s Dream Team and Super Coach fantasy point scoring for the week. They are now showing up in the Fanplanner pages and will be a regular feature of our Exteam and live scoring pages in future. (more…)

Following on from the team trends post earlier this week, and echoing a successful post from February about a 2008 Super Coach team structure, I thought it might be helpful to give an overview of how a fair few of the Fanplanner plan teams are being structured in terms of the distribution of premiums, mid-price players and rookies.

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Sometimes you can congratulate yourself for zigging when others are zagging when it comes to fantasy footy, be it though luck or good planning… or a bit of both. (more…)

One of the advantages I have in giving you fantasy coaches out there advice on who to pick up is being able to watch player popularity in the FanFooty Fanplanner feature, which is now running hot with coaches testing out different plan teams in preparation for the 2009 season using approximations of their actual prices and salary caps for the Dream Team and Super Coach competitions. (more…)

One of the less well understood aspects of the move to 17th and 18th teams in the AFL - with Gold Coast scheduled to debut in 2011 and Western Sydney possibly the year after - is how it is going to affect fantasy competitions.

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Fantasy coaches look at the AFL draw a little differently to normal football fans. We don’t particularly care about how many interstate trips each team gets, whether they start with a home game or how many times we have to play at the new Jihad (sorry, Etihad) Stadium. For 2009, what we were most worried about was round 1: were the AFL going to schedule two Thursday night games to kick off the season as they did last year starting at 6.10pm AEST, which in conjunction with the 5pm cutoff for round 1 teams to be published led to the now-infamous 70 minutes of madness?

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