Fantasy tips from Club World Cup winner

At the same time as the confetti was falling in New York New Jersey, with Chelsea having won the inaugural edition of the FIFA Club World Cup™, Paul Spiller was sat some five thousand kilometres away celebrating a second English title triumph, his own.

While Chelsea emerged on top of a 32-strong field to claim global glory, Spiller had to defy significantly greater odds to be crowned the winner of the tournament’s official fantasy game.

After seven matchdays and a final roll of the dice that he described as “total luck”, Spiller saw off close to 250,000 players to make it a clean sweep of Club World Cup honours for English entrants.

Unlike the serial title assemblers from Chelsea this was the first time that Spiller, a native of the English city of Bristol, has claimed a fantasy crown. He’s looking now to try and repeat that success in the FIFA World Cup™ fantasy game next season.

Here, the global champion shares his insights into how he was able to claim the title.

Getting started

I routinely enter the FIFA World Cup and Euro fantasy games, along with the fantasy Premier League game but I’ve never done anything and certainly never performed anything like as well as I did in this one.

Not long after the end of the English Premier League season, I decided to enter the FIFA Club World Cup fantasy competition. Initially I only intended to submit a team in the hope that it may perform well in the early rounds.  

Initial strategy

In these quick competitions I inevitably look to wildcard in round three so I picked a team which focused on the first two match days initially. Following the extra round of unlimited transfers at the start of the Round of 16, there is usually sufficient free transfers to complete the remainder of the competition with no points deductions.  

At the start, I hadn’t fully appreciated the new 12th man Booster and in hindsight this probably would’ve been better played in one of the first three matchdays when there is more potential for higher points. One thing I really enjoyed about the Club World Cup game was that you were able to change your captain each match.

Cram study and early success

To be honest I hadn’t heard of all of the teams, let alone all the players that were playing so I did a small amount of research in the week leading up to the competition just to make sure that I had a solid team and had picked some potential high scorers.

This crucially led to me picking Thomas Muller, who I captained, instead of Harry Kane in the first round of matches and I also went big on Juventus and Benfica who seemed to have an easy couple of rounds to start with.  

My transfers for the second round included Joaquin Piquerez from Palmeiras and Jhon Arias, who I had I been very impressed with in game week one and again they did well which continued to set things up nicely for me.

Wildcard deployed

Leading into the last of the group stage matches I played my wildcard which meant I brought in some PSG players. I thought they would keep a clean sheet so I went for two of their defenders instead of the popular midfield duo of Desire Doue and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia which also worked out well. Like many others I went big on the Boca Juniors defence and so it was annoying when that didn’t work out.  

I then wanted to make sure I had coverage for the captaincy, with a player from every match in the Round of 16. This is when I first bought in Gonzalo Garcia and Arda Guler from Real Madrid and I think these two players were crucial to my performance given their low ownership at the time.  

I also decided to bring in Ousmane Dembele early – mainly because that I knew other teams would struggle to bring him in when he started to perform. I also played my Qualification Booster in this round – it seemed to make sense given that many of my players were expected to progress through this round of the competition.

When things started to get real

The quarter-finals was quite a crucial round for me, having not played my 12th man Booster and I knew I wanted to get Cole Palmer in as I was afraid of what he might score in this game. I was also very fortunate that Dembele and Kylian Mbappe both scored late goals in their respective games, and were relatively low owned in the teams around me.  

I also changed my captain several times in this round and eventually Trent Alexander-Arnold got me 20 points due to being substituted before Real Madrid conceded a goal. With all this good fortune, it was after this round that I realised I might have a chance for competing at the top of the overall leaderboard.

In the title hunt

Going into the semi-final I think I was positioned about seventh or eighth overall and I thought that I would gamble on playing more Real Madrid players than teams around me probably would. I also brought in as many Chelsea players as I could and obviously they performed very well with their clean sheet and goals for Pedro [Neto] – however this round was really a complete disaster and only scoring 61 points meant that I dropped down to about 30th overall in the leaderboard.

Final roll of the dice pays off

My only chance going into the final was to have a completely different team to everyone – so my only option really was to have the full quota of Chelsea players, including Robert Sanchez, five defenders and then Palmer and Pedro. I was very surprised to find that other teams around me did not have the same idea and indeed only one team above me in the leaderboard opted for this strategy – however that team crucially only had four of the Chelsea defenders and instead had Neto.

Like many other teams around me, I played the maximum captain Booster in the final and things couldn’t have worked out any better. Having watched PSG dismantle Real Madrid in the semi-finals I didn’t really think there was any chance that Chelsea could win the final and keep a clean sheet. Obviously they scored two goals early on so I knew I had a good chance but had to hope that they did not concede for the whole of the second half.

Overall, I appreciate a lot of this was total luck and that included the captaincy choices but I did go well with several differentials, including Arda Guler. At the end, it was certainly nervous and although I don’t really support any specific team I was certainly cheering for Chelsea in that final!