Best ball draft leagues have become increasingly popular in fantasy football (NFL), but it's a format that hasn't been discussed much in soccer, mostly because draft fantasy Premier League hasn't been around very long.
I've been fan of best ball leagues for quite awhile, as I always thought the draft was the best part of any fantasy season, while the week-to-week slog of working through waivers and dealing with injuries is cumbersome and annoying. I understand why so many people love it, but it's just not my cup of tea.
There are numerous draft fantasy Premier League websites available, though none specifically offer best ball formats that allow for different formations and a bench (or if there is one, I haven't found it yet). That being said, that didn't stop me from putting together a best ball draft for the upcoming season, a league we will attempt to run based on Togga scoring, as we had a RotoWire league there last year (we'll have another this season). Unfortunately, we wanted to have an expanded roster because a best ball league is better with more potential players, so we decided to go 20 players deep, a limit too high for Togga's game. So, we'll probably kick it old school and do the league through an Excel spreadsheet.
For those unfamiliar, best ball leagues are based on taking the best player scores from each week and counting those toward your total. For example, if you have eight midfielders on your roster, the five highest-scoring ones will be counted that week. To complicate it further, we can play any formation as long as there is a minimum of three defenders and midfielders (and a maximum of five each) and one-to-three forwards. And while we constantly talk about goalkeepers all being the same, we'll still have them as part of our teams; goalkeepers are people too, you know.
There was no limit on the number of each position you could draft, though a more balanced squad allows for more roster formations. If someone only drafted three defenders then they would have those three as their starters all season, even if the players were injured, benched or transferred out. Additionally, if someone drafted just one goalkeeper and he suffered a season-ending injury in Gameweek 1 then that team would not have a keeper for the rest of the season.
Which brings me to the most important point about a best ball league: there is no in-season maintenance. That's right, no waivers, no trading, nothing. Your team at the end of the draft is your team for the entire season.
Another wrinkle is that we were allowed to select players who were not currently in the Premier League. At the time of his pick, Mike Gottlieb selected Alvaro Morata without the guarantee that he was going to transfer from Real Madrid. In fact, when he picked him, Morata was widely believed to be heading to Manchester United (coincidentally, Mike picked Romelu Lukaku with his first pick while the Belgian was still at Everton, giving him a very strong forward line). The risk in picking a player who was not already in the Premier League is that he cannot be replaced if he doesn't make the move, leaving a roster spot to accrue zero points throughout the entire season. That didn't stop people from taking fliers on guys like Morata, Thomas Lemar, Chicharito, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Naby Keita, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Benjamin Mendy, Tiemoue Bakayoko and Ivan Perisic, none of whom were officially Premier League players (some still aren't) before they were selected.
Below are tables showing how the standard snake draft went down and a breakdown of each team:
