4.5 Rotation

Since the game launched I have been planning on playing with TAA + 4 x 4.5 DEFs. I really want to avoid using transfers in these positions this season, so I have been planning long term (16 GWs until the cut off for the first WC). 

I will be playing 3 at the back, so I need to pick 2 DEFs each week from my pool of 4.I have taken a bit of a deep dive into the fixtures to find the most optimal four teams to select my 4.5 DEFs from. For the purpose of this I looked at ARS, SOU, NEW, BHA, FUL, WBA, LEE & WHU and what sort of fixture schedule you could get from the varying combinations of those teams. 

When looking at different combinations, I took note of two data points:
1 – How many times will you be forced to play a fixture against the traditional top 6 (not including Wolves, Leicester etc). 

2 – How many times can you play a home tie against a non-top 6 team. 
You can get really good rotations.

	Fixutres against top 6	Favourable home fixture
ARS NEW FUL BUR	0	24
ARS FUL WBA BUR	0	24
LEE WBA ARS BUR	0	24
LEE WBA WHU BUR	0	23
LEE FUL WBA BUR	1	23
LEE BUR ARS SOU	0	22
LEE NEW WHU BUR	0	21

The four 4.5 choices I would pick are Ayling, Taylor, Saliba & Kyle Walker-Peters. Barring injuries and new signings, I think they are all a good shout to start and if all goes well, I can let them sit & rotate in and out of my team until I choose to play my first wildcard. At which point I will look at new combinations. 
Looking at the same data points for GKs, you get the following results:

	Cost	Fixutres against top 6	Favourable home fixture
SOU FUL	9,0	0	9
SOU BHA	9,0	1	7
FUL BHA	9,0	2	9
WBA WBA	8,5	5	5
BHA BHA	8,5	5	4

As you can see, the three rotation pairs give you much better fixtures than the king & heir options, although you do save 0.5 million. I have been pretty heavy in favour of the SOU FUL rotation purely because of the fixtures but with the news that FUL have signed a keeper that ‘could’ compete with Rodak, I am changing to SOU BHA, to hopefully minimize the risk that I have to spend a transfer on a keeper before my wildcard. 

Yours sincerely,

Thomas Bracken