Fantasy Football Tips: Thousands of Dream Team managers are making a mistake ahead of the new Premier League season
With the opening weekend of the 2020/21 Premier League season not far away, the majority of Dream Team managers are making a terrible fantasy football mistake.
It's customary for all 20 teams to kick off at the same time for the first game of the season but since the 2019/20 campaign has only just finished, some adjustments have been made to the schedule.
Since Man United (semi-finals of Europa League) and Man City (quarter-finals of Champions League) made it to latter stages of the European competitions, their respective games against Burnley and Aston Villa have been postponed to allow the Manchester clubs a semi-respectable pre-season.
This means United, City, Burnley and Villa players will not participate in Game Week 1.
All those Dream Team managers who have stocked up on players from the aforementioned clubs will endure an underwhelming start to the season if they don't rectify this mistake.
This season you get five transfers per month to tweak and fiddle in search of maximum points.
And since September will be a short month (three Game Weeks) you should start with eleven players capable of scoring points in the first round of fixtures before bringing in the likes of Marcus Rashford (£4.5m), Raheem Sterling (£7.5m), etc.
This is not a oversight of the few, the vast majority of Dream Team managers have selected Man City and Man United players.
In fact, Bruno Fernandes (£5.0m) is the most popular player in the game at the time of writing.
The Portuguese midfielder features in 69.8% of teams, while Kevin De Bruyne (£7.0m) is not far behind at 62.7%.
And it's not just the Manchester clubs: Nick Pope (£3.0m) is the fourth most-picked goalkeeper at this stage while Jack Grealish (£3.0m) is in the top ten most popular midfielders.
Some of you may feel it's worth having someone like Fernandes or De Bruyne in your team from off despite the fact they will be inactive during Game Week 1 — you may already have plans for your five September transfers.
However, you can't afford to have too many players twiddling their thumbs as you don't want to be playing catch-up from the get-go.