2026-05-25, 07:13 AM - Word count:
SSL Fantasy Series:
SSL Fantasy - An Intro
SSL Fantasy - Rosters
SSL Fantasy - Scoring
We’ve started with the introduction, we’ve identified the roster spot breakout, and we’ve landed on a proposed scoring system. Now, it’s time to put those together and pull out an actual roster for SSL Fantasy.
Here is a reminder of the roster positions, and the player positions that are locked into them.
Roster Positions and Limitations:
Striker
Attacking Midfielder (Contains L/R/C)
Midfielder (Contains L/R/C)
Defensive Midfielder (Contains LWB, DM, RWB)
Defending Back (Contains LB, CB, RB)
Goalkeeper
Now, we want to actually try and build a roster with those positions, while looking at scoring amounts to make sure that we’ve balanced appropriately.
First things first, it’s good to know how many possible players can be selected from each category.
Interesting to see. Obviously Goalkeepers are the easy ones. One roster spot for GK. But then, look at Striker and Midfielder. Both are close to half of the available number of players that Attacking Midfielder, Defending Midfielder, and Defending Back have. That means you definitely should have fewer of them. But numbers don’t work out perfectly because just based on total number of players available, I’d want something like this
AM: 3
DB: 3
DM: 3
GK: 1
Mid: 2
SK: 2
The problem? That’s 14 players. I don’t like having more roster spots than players who can actually be on the pitch at the same time. So, it needs to drop to 11. Maybe that’s not supported by actual data but it just feels right. With 11 as the goal, here is where I land instead.
AM: 3
DB: 2
DM: 2
GK: 1
Mid: 2
SK: 1
Defensive Back and Defensive Midfielders take a hit and drop by 1. Both positions seem to swap with each other, though, so I’m kind of considering them similar enough that it’s not a huge hit to lower each. That puts me at 12. Striker is the other spot that drops, then. I’ll be honest, three attacking midfielders is probably too many, but when looking at points by position, and having to choose between a second Striker and a third Attacking Midfielder, the higher points of the Attacking Midfield drew my attention. Fantasy players love points, so we lean into that.
One thing you have to watch, however, is the total number of players available at each position does limit the number of teams that can be in a group at the same time. With only 23 available Attacking Midfielders, three on a team means a max of 7 teams. If you wanted to expand that further to allow more teams, you would likely have to drop AM down by 1 and increase Defending Back or Defensive Midfielder. Neither of those feels great, however, just because then you’re limiting the number of fantasy points teams score further.
I’m not content to just land on a roster count, however. A big part of playing fantasy is feeling like you have options. Too many average players and people lose interest.
So, for our next step, we need to sort players into buckets. For ease of sorting, I’m doing it by TPE. Buckets are as follows:
Rookie (TPE < 400)
Developing (TPE >=400 and < 700)
Starter (TPE >= 700 and < 1100)
Impact (TPE >= 1100 and < 1500)
Elite (TPE >= 1500 and < 1800)
Superstar (TPE >= 1800)
With these buckets, here is how the players fall. Note: This is for Majors teams only
Pretty standard distribution, makes a lot of sense. But, what about when you split that by the roster position they fall into?
Huh. Honestly, not what I was expecting. Given the high numbers for scoring, I fully expected to see Attacking Midfielder with higher counts in the Elite/Superstar. This isn’t a problem, however. The other concern that I had is that everyone would rush to grab the players in the “Superstar” tier, and a team would be at a disadvantage if they didn’t have one in each spot.
Let’s look at the actual points scored by TPE tier to see how they break out. We’ll look at total, but more importantly, average points by tier because when player selection happens you want to see how your average player would perform.
Ok, now we’re getting some clarity. Even though we saw the lower counts above, Superstar and Elite are a clear level above Impact and Starter (we’re ignoring Developing as it’s only 1 player so the sample size is skewing the data). The high total points for the Impact tier is due to player counts, but when you get down to averages, your fantasy manager is going to want ot go for Superstar and Elite players.
Now, let’s break that further and look at average points by position with these tiers.
Let’s talk about each roster position!
Notes: In each roster position, some tiers have limited number of players in that tier. We aren’t going to exclude any tiers, however, as the counts at each tier aren’t going to be high enough to consider one value consistent and another worth ignoring.
Attacking Midfielder
Roster Spots: 3
Starter actually has the highest average scoring points here. That’s both surprising, and also something that your regular fantasy manager would likely ignore. Maybe one of these two players would be a trendy waiver pickup, but they aren’t getting drafted.
Elite comes in second place, just behind Starter. These 8 players are all getting picked up in the draft, without a doubt. These are the players that would carry a team and if they managed to get two of them, they would feel pretty strong throughout their eason.
Superstar actually comes in third here, which is surprising. There are likely players drafted potentially 1st and 2nd picks overall given Attacking Midfielder scores the most points. The players who took them wouldn’t be out of the running, but they wouldn’t feel great about their chances of winning.
Impact comes in last. With the number of roster spots, though, every team is going to have at least one impact player in their roster, maybe more. There are the players that will likely shift the most throughout the season on rosters as managers chase the top scores.
Defending Back
Roster Spots: 2
Elite takes the top spot here, by a significant margin. If you drafted a Superstar defensive back, you are kicking yourself watching the Elite tier outperform them every week.
Superstar does manage to come in second, but it’s a rough second. 17 points on average behind Elite, and only 7 points on average ahead of the 3rd place tier.
Impact is third here, with the bulk of the players. With the number of available Defending Backs and only 2 roster spots, most managers are not expecting to have an impact tier player, which is good because they aren’t doing well.
Starter is last, but none of these players will ever be rostered. Even with waivers, too many higher tier players are available.
Defensive Midfielder
Roster Spots: 2
Impact jumps into 1st place in this category. This is very surprising given the previous two categories, and this is probably where you’ll see managers who are comfortable taking a little risk might grab an Impact player off waivers if they get impatient with their drafted Defensive Midfielder.
Superstar comes in second, but is very close behind Impact. Managers who grabbed a Superstar DM will be very happy, and will be content to sit with that player all season.
Elite comes in third, but really, it’s just barely behind the first place group. Another tier where managers will likely sit comfortably with their drafted player.
Starter is last, and like Defending Back, won’t be rostered.
Overall, Defensive Midfielder is interesting because the top 3 tiers are all so close together. You likely don’t actually see any waiver movement here. There just isn’t a ton of reason someone with a Superstar or Elite player would need to grab an Impact player. The gain just isn’t high enough.
Goalkeeper
Roster Spots: 1
Finally Superstar takes the top spot. Your best goals are your highest TPE goalies. The real question would be, how soon does someone grab a goalie in the draft knowing they are giving up a different position.
Developing’s only player in the majors shows up here. Brad Woof has the lowest TPE of all majors players, yet he has the second highest average points for Goalkeepers. I honestly don’t know if anyone would be crazy enough to pick Woof up during a season, even after the halfway point and seeing progress so far.
Impact comes in third. This would be an interesting spot to check how managers behave. In a normal distribution, Superstar and Elite can fill all the Goalkeeper spots. But, Elite scores so much lower than Impact, you would guess that one manager would make a wavier flip at some point.
Starter is fourth, only slightly behind Impact. Still, not likely to be rostered.
Elite with a very rough fifth place here. Four Goalkeepers who I believe would all have been drafted, and then dropped with waivers because they just weren’t performing. You are a very unhappy fantasy manager if your Goalkeeper fits in this category.
Midfielder
Roster Spots: 2
Superstar is FAR and above the best tier for this roster position. Taking 1st place by an average of 83 points over second place, and almost 100 points on average over 3rd. If you’re one of the two managers who got a Superstar Midfielder, you are ecstatic.
Elite comes in second, but it’s a very far second. If you’re one of the managers that took a Superstar with one pick and an Elite with the other, you’re not bothered. If you punted on this position and got stuck with two Elite players, you’re livid.
Impact is the only other category and it took last. Luckily, no one probably drafted an Impact player for Midfielder.
Striker
Roster Spots: 1
Elite takes the lead in our last category, and it takes it with a pretty large gap. 22 points on average over the 2nd place tier, Elite Strikers are making their managers very happy.
Impact actually takes second place. Given the count of Superstar and Elite players, no one drafts an Impact player. That said, with the 3 Superstar players not producing, an Impact player may get a waiver pickup.
Superstar is a disappointing 3rd place. 3 Fantasy managers will have drafted a Striker that they are angry at match to match. The only question is how stubbornly do they hold onto them?
Starter comes in a distant fourth. They won’t be rostered at any point.
With all of that in mind, I feel good about the roster spot counts that have been selected. Given the numbers we have seen, I also feel fairly strongly that five teams in a league would be the right sizing. Five gives flexibility at every spot to try and make shifts in roster as the season goes on, and also gives some draft flexibility if people want to overemphasize on picking one position first and not get completely ruined in the other spots by not having enough of a choice or only getting the very bottom tier choices. You can see multiple spots where how you draft or use waivers would dramatically impact your season, so having five teams in the league would give managers a better chance to strategize as the season goes on.
Just one article left in the series, and it's the culmination of everything so far. In the next article, we'll have five teams mock draft and see what actually happens!
SSL Fantasy - An Intro
SSL Fantasy - Rosters
SSL Fantasy - Scoring
We’ve started with the introduction, we’ve identified the roster spot breakout, and we’ve landed on a proposed scoring system. Now, it’s time to put those together and pull out an actual roster for SSL Fantasy.
Here is a reminder of the roster positions, and the player positions that are locked into them.
Roster Positions and Limitations:
Striker
Attacking Midfielder (Contains L/R/C)
Midfielder (Contains L/R/C)
Defensive Midfielder (Contains LWB, DM, RWB)
Defending Back (Contains LB, CB, RB)
Goalkeeper
Now, we want to actually try and build a roster with those positions, while looking at scoring amounts to make sure that we’ve balanced appropriately.
First things first, it’s good to know how many possible players can be selected from each category.
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Attacking Midfielder | 23 |
| Defending Back | 35 |
| Defensive Midfielder | 29 |
| Goalkeeper | 13 |
| Midfielder | 18 |
| Striker | 16 |
Interesting to see. Obviously Goalkeepers are the easy ones. One roster spot for GK. But then, look at Striker and Midfielder. Both are close to half of the available number of players that Attacking Midfielder, Defending Midfielder, and Defending Back have. That means you definitely should have fewer of them. But numbers don’t work out perfectly because just based on total number of players available, I’d want something like this
AM: 3
DB: 3
DM: 3
GK: 1
Mid: 2
SK: 2
The problem? That’s 14 players. I don’t like having more roster spots than players who can actually be on the pitch at the same time. So, it needs to drop to 11. Maybe that’s not supported by actual data but it just feels right. With 11 as the goal, here is where I land instead.
AM: 3
DB: 2
DM: 2
GK: 1
Mid: 2
SK: 1
Defensive Back and Defensive Midfielders take a hit and drop by 1. Both positions seem to swap with each other, though, so I’m kind of considering them similar enough that it’s not a huge hit to lower each. That puts me at 12. Striker is the other spot that drops, then. I’ll be honest, three attacking midfielders is probably too many, but when looking at points by position, and having to choose between a second Striker and a third Attacking Midfielder, the higher points of the Attacking Midfield drew my attention. Fantasy players love points, so we lean into that.
One thing you have to watch, however, is the total number of players available at each position does limit the number of teams that can be in a group at the same time. With only 23 available Attacking Midfielders, three on a team means a max of 7 teams. If you wanted to expand that further to allow more teams, you would likely have to drop AM down by 1 and increase Defending Back or Defensive Midfielder. Neither of those feels great, however, just because then you’re limiting the number of fantasy points teams score further.
I’m not content to just land on a roster count, however. A big part of playing fantasy is feeling like you have options. Too many average players and people lose interest.
So, for our next step, we need to sort players into buckets. For ease of sorting, I’m doing it by TPE. Buckets are as follows:
Rookie (TPE < 400)
Developing (TPE >=400 and < 700)
Starter (TPE >= 700 and < 1100)
Impact (TPE >= 1100 and < 1500)
Elite (TPE >= 1500 and < 1800)
Superstar (TPE >= 1800)
With these buckets, here is how the players fall. Note: This is for Majors teams only
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Superstar | 21 |
| Elite | 42 |
| Impact | 55 |
| Starter | 15 |
| Developing | 1 |
Pretty standard distribution, makes a lot of sense. But, what about when you split that by the roster position they fall into?
| TPE Tier | Attacking Midfielder | Defending Back | Defensive Midfielder | Goalkeeper | Midfielder | Striker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Superstar | 2 | 6 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| Elite | 8 | 7 | 9 | 4 | 8 | 6 |
| Impact | 11 | 17 | 11 | 4 | 8 | 4 |
| Starter | 2 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 3 | |
| Developing | 1 |
Huh. Honestly, not what I was expecting. Given the high numbers for scoring, I fully expected to see Attacking Midfielder with higher counts in the Elite/Superstar. This isn’t a problem, however. The other concern that I had is that everyone would rush to grab the players in the “Superstar” tier, and a team would be at a disadvantage if they didn’t have one in each spot.
Let’s look at the actual points scored by TPE tier to see how they break out. We’ll look at total, but more importantly, average points by tier because when player selection happens you want to see how your average player would perform.
| TPE Tier | Total Points | Average Points |
|---|---|---|
| Superstar | 1847.25 | 87.96 |
| Elite | 3794.75 | 90.35 |
| Impact | 4119.25 | 74.90 |
| Starter | 1059.75 | 70.65 |
| Developing | 91 | 91 |
Ok, now we’re getting some clarity. Even though we saw the lower counts above, Superstar and Elite are a clear level above Impact and Starter (we’re ignoring Developing as it’s only 1 player so the sample size is skewing the data). The high total points for the Impact tier is due to player counts, but when you get down to averages, your fantasy manager is going to want ot go for Superstar and Elite players.
Now, let’s break that further and look at average points by position with these tiers.
| TPE Bucket | Attacking Midfielder | Defending Back | Defensive Midfielder | Goalkeeper | Midfielder | Striker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Superstar | 113.50 | 53.79 | 69.33 | 118.50 | 161.88 | 106.92 |
| Elite | 122.44 | 70.07 | 68.33 | 74.00 | 78.81 | 130.54 |
| Impact | 109.16 | 46.94 | 70.57 | 90.00 | 68.75 | 108.56 |
| Starter | 127.75 | 44.50 | 50.08 | 86.50 | 86.17 | |
| Developing | 91.00 |
Let’s talk about each roster position!
Notes: In each roster position, some tiers have limited number of players in that tier. We aren’t going to exclude any tiers, however, as the counts at each tier aren’t going to be high enough to consider one value consistent and another worth ignoring.
Attacking Midfielder
Roster Spots: 3
Starter actually has the highest average scoring points here. That’s both surprising, and also something that your regular fantasy manager would likely ignore. Maybe one of these two players would be a trendy waiver pickup, but they aren’t getting drafted.
Elite comes in second place, just behind Starter. These 8 players are all getting picked up in the draft, without a doubt. These are the players that would carry a team and if they managed to get two of them, they would feel pretty strong throughout their eason.
Superstar actually comes in third here, which is surprising. There are likely players drafted potentially 1st and 2nd picks overall given Attacking Midfielder scores the most points. The players who took them wouldn’t be out of the running, but they wouldn’t feel great about their chances of winning.
Impact comes in last. With the number of roster spots, though, every team is going to have at least one impact player in their roster, maybe more. There are the players that will likely shift the most throughout the season on rosters as managers chase the top scores.
Defending Back
Roster Spots: 2
Elite takes the top spot here, by a significant margin. If you drafted a Superstar defensive back, you are kicking yourself watching the Elite tier outperform them every week.
Superstar does manage to come in second, but it’s a rough second. 17 points on average behind Elite, and only 7 points on average ahead of the 3rd place tier.
Impact is third here, with the bulk of the players. With the number of available Defending Backs and only 2 roster spots, most managers are not expecting to have an impact tier player, which is good because they aren’t doing well.
Starter is last, but none of these players will ever be rostered. Even with waivers, too many higher tier players are available.
Defensive Midfielder
Roster Spots: 2
Impact jumps into 1st place in this category. This is very surprising given the previous two categories, and this is probably where you’ll see managers who are comfortable taking a little risk might grab an Impact player off waivers if they get impatient with their drafted Defensive Midfielder.
Superstar comes in second, but is very close behind Impact. Managers who grabbed a Superstar DM will be very happy, and will be content to sit with that player all season.
Elite comes in third, but really, it’s just barely behind the first place group. Another tier where managers will likely sit comfortably with their drafted player.
Starter is last, and like Defending Back, won’t be rostered.
Overall, Defensive Midfielder is interesting because the top 3 tiers are all so close together. You likely don’t actually see any waiver movement here. There just isn’t a ton of reason someone with a Superstar or Elite player would need to grab an Impact player. The gain just isn’t high enough.
Goalkeeper
Roster Spots: 1
Finally Superstar takes the top spot. Your best goals are your highest TPE goalies. The real question would be, how soon does someone grab a goalie in the draft knowing they are giving up a different position.
Developing’s only player in the majors shows up here. Brad Woof has the lowest TPE of all majors players, yet he has the second highest average points for Goalkeepers. I honestly don’t know if anyone would be crazy enough to pick Woof up during a season, even after the halfway point and seeing progress so far.
Impact comes in third. This would be an interesting spot to check how managers behave. In a normal distribution, Superstar and Elite can fill all the Goalkeeper spots. But, Elite scores so much lower than Impact, you would guess that one manager would make a wavier flip at some point.
Starter is fourth, only slightly behind Impact. Still, not likely to be rostered.
Elite with a very rough fifth place here. Four Goalkeepers who I believe would all have been drafted, and then dropped with waivers because they just weren’t performing. You are a very unhappy fantasy manager if your Goalkeeper fits in this category.
Midfielder
Roster Spots: 2
Superstar is FAR and above the best tier for this roster position. Taking 1st place by an average of 83 points over second place, and almost 100 points on average over 3rd. If you’re one of the two managers who got a Superstar Midfielder, you are ecstatic.
Elite comes in second, but it’s a very far second. If you’re one of the managers that took a Superstar with one pick and an Elite with the other, you’re not bothered. If you punted on this position and got stuck with two Elite players, you’re livid.
Impact is the only other category and it took last. Luckily, no one probably drafted an Impact player for Midfielder.
Striker
Roster Spots: 1
Elite takes the lead in our last category, and it takes it with a pretty large gap. 22 points on average over the 2nd place tier, Elite Strikers are making their managers very happy.
Impact actually takes second place. Given the count of Superstar and Elite players, no one drafts an Impact player. That said, with the 3 Superstar players not producing, an Impact player may get a waiver pickup.
Superstar is a disappointing 3rd place. 3 Fantasy managers will have drafted a Striker that they are angry at match to match. The only question is how stubbornly do they hold onto them?
Starter comes in a distant fourth. They won’t be rostered at any point.
With all of that in mind, I feel good about the roster spot counts that have been selected. Given the numbers we have seen, I also feel fairly strongly that five teams in a league would be the right sizing. Five gives flexibility at every spot to try and make shifts in roster as the season goes on, and also gives some draft flexibility if people want to overemphasize on picking one position first and not get completely ruined in the other spots by not having enough of a choice or only getting the very bottom tier choices. You can see multiple spots where how you draft or use waivers would dramatically impact your season, so having five teams in the league would give managers a better chance to strategize as the season goes on.
Just one article left in the series, and it's the culmination of everything so far. In the next article, we'll have five teams mock draft and see what actually happens!
