MLS Fantasy Boss A Fantasy MLS Community
By: The Fantasy Therapist
Welcome back. We’re about one-third of the way through the season, and hopefully by now you’re feeling comfortable with building an FMLS team. We’ve covered a lot of basic strategies and resources over the past eleven weeks, and now it’s time to start looking ahead and putting those strategies to work for the first double-game week (or DGW) of the 2025 season. Double-game weeks in FMLS are exciting because you get your players’ combined score for the week – all the points they earn in both games of the week get combined and applied to your overall score for the week.
This creates opportunities for big gains or losses, so we’re getting started a little early to help you navigate the differences in building a DGW team. In Part 1, I’ll discuss targeting players and managing rotation. In Part 2, we’ll cover how to approach picking players at different positions, and the formation which will allow you the best chance to maximize your points, as well as a short section on how rivalry matches can affect fantasy scores in honor of Rivalry Week.
Matchups
For DGWs, I always start with the schedule. Teams with two home matches are most appealing, followed by 1 home/1 away teams, and finally teams with two away matches. The Mega-Reference spreadsheet found in the MLSFB Discord helpfully has teams broken down into these three categories and is a great place to start your research. In GW13, only four teams have two home matches: Austin, Montreal, Nashville and San Diego. There will usually be a couple of teams that only have a single game in each DGW (4 in GW13) – I avoid those teams entirely except for scrubs.
Once I look at how much teams will have to travel, I begin to look at their matchups. Players from double-home teams with good matchups get picked first, then double-home with tougher matchups, then 1H/1A good matchups and on down the line. I try to stay away from double-away teams unless the matchups are amazing, because teams that travel twice in a week are much more likely to rotate. Lineup rotation is one of the biggest challenges in a DGW, and can be a crushing blow if you’re counting on two games worth of points and only get 90 or even 120 minutes from one of your players.
Rotation
There are several factors to consider when looking at rotation. We’ve covered some of this in previous columns, but it becomes much more important in a DGW when you’re trying to maximize points from every player on your team.
1) How crowded has the team’s schedule been lately? If a team has had a busy spring with several weeks of midweek CCC games, that’s a red flag.
2) Does the manager have a history of rotating during DGWs? There are a few managers in MLS who have shown in the past that they like to make use of their full roster (Pablo Mastroeni at RSL and Ben Olsen at Houston are two serial rotators). Also, pay attention to teams like Vancouver – Jesper Sorenson has rotated pretty heavily during their CCC run, so I would expect him to continue to do that for DGWs.
3) How are the team’s games split? If one game is a home match against a rival and one is an out-of-conference road match, there’s a good chance you may see rotation in the road match, since they tend to be prioritized less.
4) And finally, are there any issues with the player you’re looking at. Are they recovering from a recent injury? Are they an older player (like Miami’s Barcelona contingent)? Is one of their matches on turf? These are all factors to consider.
They may not cause rotation, but they could, so if you’re choosing between two similar players, if one is a higher rotation risk, this is information worth knowing. It’s also good to note that there are some attacking players (guys like Lionel Messi or Denis Bouanga) who are worth having even if they’re only likely to come off the bench for one of the two games, due to the attacking impact they can make in limited minutes–especially against tired defenders. On the other hand, defenders are a bigger rotation concern, because if they don’t play at least 60 minutes, they lose out on their shot at a clean sheet bonus.
How Does this Apply?
Week 12 is not a DGW, but you may want to begin looking at matchups and considering rotation risks for Week 13 (U.S. Open Cup begins this week). This is a good way to start building your DGW team. In the case of this upcoming DGW, the 4 teams with double-home matches aren’t the most exciting teams, so you may need to dig a little deeper than usual for some stronger plays.
As always, continue to target weak attacks for your defensive players and weak defenses for your attackers. Keep in mind home & away splits, since most teams will likely have one of each. Once you’ve gone through these different factors, you can begin to think about specific positions and how to set up your team, which I’ll discuss more in the second half of this article. Good luck, check back for Part 2 next week, and don’t forget to have fun!
The “Fantasy Physician” is Ron Birnbaum, @Half Century City on Discord
The “Fantasy Therapist” is Mike Leister, @Kenobi on Discord
