📬 MD1 is always the most exciting of every UCL Fantasy season, but the 2024/2025 edition might just have been the most hyped yet.

With the new UCL format (and therefore new UCL Fantasy format) coming into place, managers were super excited to see how it played out.

😂 One particular qwirk for MD1 was the fact it was being played over three MD’s and managers were going to get THREE cracks at nailing a captaincy pick. How ironic therefore, that on the first day, the most popular captain scored FOUR goals in a huge fantasy performance.

🪦 RIP non-Kane captainers.

I’m really pleased with my very solid start. 110 points and 60k ish in the world out of 1m+. In the past when I’ve had good rank finishes (including my 2xtop1k), I have been in the hundreds of thousands rank-wise after MD1. This bodes well if I can keep it up.

Even in a week when hundreds of thousands of managers captained Harry Kane, I managed to stand out with some other high performing picks. Gyokeres, Goncalves, Yamal, Grimaldo, Can and even Trent all returned for me - but I want to focus on my 0% owned player who scored - Jacob Ramsey.

I’ve said this many times before, but I have a tactic that seems to have worked well for me over the years. Usually, by the time a matchday deadline (particularly MD1) comes around, I have a couple of cheap slots I need to fill with a nailed player. I expect nothing form these slots, so can take any punts I like.

Why not then, wait to see the initial line-ups (usually less favoured fixtures), and bring in a couple of tasty cheap players you KNOW are going to start, rather than punt on, say, a £4m defender or a £5m midfielder, who could always get benched.

I did. this and brought in both Ramsey and Bogarde from Aston Villa (total: £9.5m) and it worked a treat with Ramsey scoring and Villa keeping a CS (I was just unlucky that Bogarde went off injured at HT!)

Bring on MD2 where I’m hoping players like TAA, Gloukh & Yamal can go big.