Movin’ on up – overall progress with 44 trades

One of the unknowns with 44 trades is whether coaches can still improve their overall position towards the end of the season, and if progress is more difficult than last year.

I have done some research, but this is an important issue so please post your own views in the comments below.

My Own Progress

The chart below shows my own overall progress this year  – i.e. overall ranking in each round.  My experience is probably unusual but it is useful to show what is possible.

I haven’t mentioned my ranking at all this year because it was so embarrassing.  Unfortunately I missed the last of the lockouts in the first week.  Even worse I was testing a spreadsheet and putting random nobodies into the DT website team  and then checking their details came up properly in the spreadsheet.  Then I left my team without putting my final players back, I thought I had plenty of time before the next lockout.  Wrong!

So my first round score was 1,600 with 4 donuts, even worse I was stuck with a lot of dud players until I could trade them out.  It took me until round 8 to get rid of them all; in the end I was taking donuts from players I wanted to keep, just to trade out players who hadn’t got a game yet from my benches.

However, despite this I have moved up every round except round 8.  After the first round I thought I might be able to get to about 20k overall, or 10k if I was lucky, but not much further.  This has proven to be true.  Since round 8 I have moved up over 40k positions in overall ranking.  I might be able to get to 15k by the end of the year but that’s it.

I think this shows that one of the benefits of 44 trades is that someone who stuffs the start can still get enough cash together and trade their way to build a competitive team before the last part of the year – e.g. over the 6 rounds since the byes I have averaged 2,228, and I am in the top half finals in all my leagues.

But is there a log jam at the top?

Coaches from previous years know that as you move higher in the overall ranking, it becomes more difficult to keep moving up.  However, in previous years we were helped by the fact that teams around us blew up when they ran out of trades and fell backwards, which won’t happen this year.

So two questions for this year are:

• Is overall progress significantly harder this year?
• If so, is it a turn off for the game?

Firstly, let’s look at scores and rankings from this year compared to last year.

Well this is a bit of a shock – scoring was higher in 2012 than 2013.  I expect this is because in 2013 we had best 18 scores in the byes which might have created slightly lower scores.  However, I expected the higher scoring from the 6-8-2-6 structure and 44 trades would have created higher total scores in 2013.

The points gap between the levels is also less this year than at the same stage last year.  So this year if you are at rank 10k, you would need to gain 393 points on your rivals to move up to rank 5k, whereas last year the gap was bigger at 462 points.  In theory this should make it easier to move up, as we should be scoring more now than last year.

But we need to also look at what scores are needed to stay at a certain level.

The table above shows what you have to score to stay at a certain overall level.  For example this year if you were at rank 5k in round 15, and your average score from R16 to R19 was 2,231, your rank would still be the same now, after round 19.  Whereas last year you would only need to average 2,209 to maintain your 5k rank.  So you need to score 22 more points per round to keep your 5k position this year.

This is consistent through all the levels shown – you need to score between 15 to 63 points more each round to hold your position compared to last year.  But with 8 midfielders and 44 trades I think this is doable.

Sure you need to score even more to move up, but with the gaps between levels smaller than last year, I don’t think the situation is worse than it was last year.

Some readers might be interested in what is happening at various levels in the top 1,000.  Basically I don’t have comparable data between the years, but I suspect it will be the same.  This is where your comments are important to relate your own experiences.

So my conclusion at this stage of the year is that 44 trades has not made it any more difficult to move up in the overall rankings than it was last year.

What do you think?  Has anyone moved up more than my 88k positions?  Have you reached a position where you are stuck?  Please make comments below or hit me up on twitter @NixTrader.

Next Monday:  Has 44 trades had any effect on team variety?