Across 38 gameweeks
Every dollar you spend
in August is wasted
FAAB budgets drain as a season runs, so the same dollar
meets less competition in April than in August. The gap is not subtle: a
dollar spent in the last six gameweeks bought roughly fifteen times the
points of a dollar spent in the first six.
What one FAAB dollar buys
Points returned per dollar of winning bids. Losing bids are free, which
is exactly why the market behaves the way it does.
Gameweek points per dollar spent
the return on a one-week rental
Where the money actually goes
total spent on winning bids
Two thirds of the season's entire
FAAB spend goes in the first six gameweeks, at the worst exchange rate
of the year.
And it gets easier to win
Less money in circulation means contested players go cheap, and go to
whoever bothers to claim them.
Price of winning a contested claim
within a division, where claims actually compete
Contested auctions won with a $0 bid
waiver priority, no money
This is an equilibrium, not a free lunch for everyone.
Late bids are cheap because everyone else has spent. If the whole
league held its budget back, April would be expensive too. What the
numbers say is that a manager who deviates from the crowd — who
sits out the August auctions and keeps powder dry — is buying at a
fraction of the price. That edge exists only while most people do not
take it.
Pickup value by third of the season
Gameweek by gameweek
Pickups per gameweek, and what the average one returned. Spikes are
usually blank or double gameweeks, where squads are stretched and the
waiver wire does more work.
Pickups made
all buckets, by target gameweek
Mean FPts returned
waiver adds, by target gameweek
Every gameweek