fletcherpost said:
Since you're the talent, the man to beat, the one to watch...how much squad maintenance, and time spent, does it take to be competitive? I made a team last year but i never went to the website after i registered my team...didnae have the time, or...i remembered what i was like when i did fantasy baseball and i spent too much time and took it a bit too seriously.
Depends on what you mean by competitive. It's basically impossible to do well if you pick a team at the beginning of the season and then forget about it for six months. To do reasonably well, you need to update your team on a weekly basis to account for injuries, form, rotation, fixtures, and so on. But that doesn't have to take a lot of time -- say 10-15 minutes/week on Friday afternoon (or Saturday morning in the UK) to read an injury report, look at the fixture list, adjust your lineup and maybe make one or two transfers.
To really compete for winning a competitive league, I think you have to do a little more than that. It helps a lot to follow the ups and downs of the transfer market, so you can snag players before they get expensive or dump players before their value drops further. It helps to plan your transfer/rotation strategy out 4-6 weeks ahead, based on fixtures. Capitalizing on double gameweeks (where due to rescheduling a team plays twice within a single scoring period) is an absolute must, as is using your wildcard at the right time.
Like most things of this nature, there are diminishing returns to the value you get out of further time investment. There are people on the internet building models to test which budget allocation strategies are most optimal -- that's a lot further than I go.
Helpful websites:
fantasyfootballscout.co.uk is helpful. They have several very useful features: a calendar showing the entire league's next six fixtures, color-coded for difficulty; a set-piece/penalty taker tracker (players with these roles are more valuable and can be good bargains on weaker teams); and an injury/likely lineups tracker. They also do analysis and commentary, although I've found that stuff less useful.
There are a number of sites that try to reverse-engineer the FPL pricing algorithm to predict player price movements.
http://www.fiso.co.uk/crackthecode.php is the one I like best but they should all be taken with a big grain of salt, especially early in the season (it takes them some time to calibrate the algorithm).