2022-23 Melbourne City Fantasy ALW guide

The A-League Women finally has its own official Fantasy football competition, and with the league taking centre stage in Australia over the next month alongside the World Cup, it's an opportune time to analyse how Melbourne City's options could contribute to your mini-league glory.

I wrote a similar guide for the A-League Men's competition back in September which extensively covered both the basics of Fantasy football and the more advanced intricacies of the Fantasy A-Leagues' (FAL) unique scoring system. I'm assuming that most readers of today's article will already be playing Fantasy ALM and are hence familiar with these concepts, but if you are jumping into Fantasy football for the first time or didn't read that article, then I implore you to follow this link back to that article (skip straight to the Beginner or Advanced sections depending on your needs) as it lays the groundwork for much of what is mentioned in this piece.

My hope is that the pair of these articles can be used as a guide by both beginner and experienced Fantasy football players to inform their squad choices, particularly around City players, but also to guide their wider selections generally.

Wilkinson was City's highest average points scorer in 21/22 | Photo: Andrew Wiseman (@wisemansports)

In this article, I'll skip over the explanations of FAL, the types of players that make attractive Fantasy options vs. those that don't, and the differences between FAL and FPL (again, head back to the ALM edition for a comprehensive guide on these things).

Instead, I'll briefly discuss one notable difference between FALM and FALW, before moving on to a table of City's stat-leaders from 2021-22 for all point-scoring stats, a rough 'fixture ticker/ difficulty rating' for our opening 10 games, and a 'City players tier ranking' to finish things off.

Bye the way...

Whilst most of the logic from the original Fantasy A-Leagues guide still applies, there is one recommendation I made in the beginners' section that can be called into question specifically for the 2022/23 season of the A-League Women: to prioritise your funds for your starting XI.

The issue with this advice is that in 2022/23 only, there will be 11 teams competing in the ALW, meaning each team will have two byes. This therefore demands a stronger bench to cover for the unavailability of players who will miss each round. Whilst we're unlikely to be troubled by a Western United bye, for instance, a week off for teams with multiple strong Fantasy options (Sydney, Victory, City especially) could cause chaos if you've loaded up without having adequate bench cover.

Fortunately, there are several extremely underpriced players in this year's FALW who will be useful for overcoming this unique challenge - two of whom feature in the 'must-haves' tier at the bottom of this article.

Stat leaders

Moving onto City's Fantasy options specifically, here's a table of the top three players for each of the point-scoring statistics in the 2021/22 season from the current City squad:

*Total crossing data. Only successful crosses count towards points.

All data from FBRef.

Fixture ticker

Totally subjective, so recategorise teams if you disagree with how they've been rated. UPPERCASE indicates home fixtures, lowercase indicates away fixtures.