MLS Fantasy Boss A Fantasy MLS Community
By: The Fantasy Physician
Week 9 Big Question – How do I manage player selection in the first Double Game Week (DGW) of the 2026 Season
There are few dates on the calendar that fire the imaginations of veteran fantasy football managers as much as these: opening weekend, Decision Day in MLS, and the first big double game week (DGW). Welcome to the first big double game week!
Different fantasy platforms treat DGWs differently. Kickbase – like the most recent legacy FMLS system – simply sums the scores players get from both games. Other platforms eg SofaScore are treating this week as two separate gameweeks, one on Wednesday with scores coming from the twenty-two teams playing on Wednesday and then a separate gameweek that covers Saturday and Sunday with scores coming from all thirty MLS teams.
Kickbase managers (our non-exclusive focus) will have to quickly pick a squad before lockout Wednesday but make decisions about players after scrutinizing the whole picture across the midweek and weekend matches. Whew!
Assessing Matchups and Players in a DGW
Seasoned fantasy managers love the DGWs and fear them at the same time. They call on the broadest set of skills and have a lot of potential pitfalls as well. DGWs are like the signature par 5 holes on a golf course.
Consider these 6 steps – in general and in a nutshell – when planning your squad for DGWs:
Now let’s walk these steps together as we plan for Kickbase gameweek 9 of 2026:
Understand the Schedule for Gameweek 9
Some teams play only once (fade them) in each of these cases on the weekend, and the teams that play twice play either two at home, two away, or one home and one away:
- Home and Home: Toronto and Columbus
- Home and then Away: Orlando, NYRB, NYCFC, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, RSL, LAFC, San Jose
- Away and then Home: LA Galaxy, Cincinnati, DCU, Minnesota, San Diego, Miami, Austin
- Away and Away: Charlotte, Philadelphia, New England, Colorado
- Single Match Home: Seattle, St. Louis, Nashville, Chicago, Montreal, Vancouver
- Single Match Away: Portland, SKC
Comment: We always prefer home over away matches and so we clearly prefer teams playing twice at home to teams playing twice away (all things being equal, which inevitably they are not!). Teams playing one home and one away match live somewhere in the middle. It’s not obvious to me that the order of home/away matters a lot. It may be the case that teams rotate more on the road. If a club is going to rest Messi, Son, Werner, or Reus, they might as well avoid having them travel. Perhaps that slightly favors the away-then-home sequence in cases in which we can check lineups or get information about whether a certain key player traveled with the team.
With twenty-two out of the thirty MLS teams playing twice, I would call this a “massive DGW” which is to say that you have a lot of player choices and should take all of them from the teams that play twice. In formats with a bench, some managers consider late Hail Mary’s from teams playing only one match later in the schedule, but that does not apply to the benchless Kickbase platform. More limited mini (say three or fewer) or mid-size (enough teams that you could fill your team barely with only DGW players) force us to consider whether players with only one match. Not true this week; you have 22 teams to choose from.
This week’s matches are not happening in a temporal vacuum. Don’t forget: LAFC, Nashville, LA Galaxy, and Seattle all played tough matches midweek last week in the CONCACAF Champions Cup (CCC) AND over the weekend in MLS. Most observers could see that tired legs hindered LAFC in their match against San Jose this past Sunday. They will not be less tired on Wednesday. Nashville and LA Galaxy also traveled to their fixtures over the past weekend.
Looking past this DGW, LAFC and Nashville play CCC semifinals midweek after this DGW (Nashville on Tues) and LAFC has a huge challenge in Toluca on Wednesday. They must rotate players in the DGW to recover some and to meet the demands of the week ahead. I would overall avoid LAFC players for those reasons. Nashville, playing only one match in the DGW, is also a less attractive team despite their quality. Teams that advanced in the US Open Cup also have matches midweek after the DGW. Now having reached the Round of 16, the glint of a trophy has appeared on their horizons, and many will want to field strong lineups since they are playing either other MLS squads or the pluckiest USL survivors playing their matches-of-the-year:
US Open Cup matches the week after this DGW: Tuesday sees Charlotte vs Atlanta and San Jose vs Minnesota. Wednesday features RBNY vs. NYCFC (so two DGW teams in the Hudson River Derby), New England vs. Orlando, Columbus vs USL1’s One Knoxville, Chicago v St. Louis, Houston vs USL Championship’s Louisville, and Colorado vs. USL’s Colorado Springs. I am modestly less concerned about fatigue from the US Open Cup matches that preceded this DGW because many MLS sides rotated for those matches, which were 100% against lower division teams.
Which MLS DGW squads are the least burdened by matches in the leadup and following the DGW? Toronto, Dallas, RSL, Cincinnati, DC United, San Diego, Miami, Austin, and Philadelphia.
Now let’s judge the matchups by one of the many ways of judging individual matchups, where ultimately in the case of the teams playing twice, we want to come up with impression of that team’s players’ fantasy prospects vis a vis both matches.
There are lots of ways to assess matchups and many avid fantasy managers at this point can kind of “eyeball” it. But we do like numbers here at FSC, so in the article for Gameweek 7, I presented one idea for a simple quantitative assessment of matchups from both an attacking and defensive standpoint. Add the home team’s season average expected goals (xG) to the away team’s average expected goals against (xGA) to come up with an ordinally rankable attacking metric and the reverse – adding home team xGA to away team xG – to come up with a rankable defensive metric. One benefit of this method is that it’s only one easy extra step – summing a given club’s attacking (or defending) metric from both games of the DGW to come up with overall (again rankable) metrics for attacking and defending potential (and hopefully Fantasy points) across the DGW
Although this article is focused on the Kickbase platform, managers using the Sofascore platform (and others) may be interested in the individual matchups, so I have included the relevant tables below.
Midweek Match Attacking Tiers (data in all tables taken from the Footy Stats website)
Midweek Match Defending Tiers:
While we always want to emphasize home teams, in a week in which many teams play home and away, we want to be able to look at the away teams with the best prospects. That’s easy; what looks bad for the home team in attack is probably very good for the away team in defense (i.e. look at the bottommost away teams in the tables for the opposite metric).
Weekend Match Attacking Tiers:
Weekend Match Defending Tiers
Combined Double Game Week Attacking Tiers
Combined Double Game Week Defending Tiers
In any fantasy platform, the DGW bugbear is anything that limits the minutes of a player when compared to alternatives. With limited ability to review lineups (though more than usual) and no bench, Kickbase managers need to err on the side of caution when it comes to player rotation and non-availability. The extensive discussion above about the matches before and after the gameweek are meant to help you identify red flags for rotation or dead legs (the consequence of neglecting rotation) among teams, including some with ostensibly favorable matchups. What else limits player minutes? Injuries are obvious limiters, and so it is vital to review the league’s player availability report that comes out Tuesday from which anyone listed as “Out” should not be in your lineup, and you should mostly avoid players listed as “Questionable.” Another trap can come from disciplinary issues. The league will also issue a separate disciplinary report that includes suspended players (avoid them) and players on Yellow Card Watch (YCW). Players on YCW are one yellow card away from suspension in the subsequent match because of accumulation of yellow cards to that point in the season. The final report will come out Tuesday, but currently the YCW list looks like Phillip Zinckernagel of Chicago (playing only one match so less relevant), Telasco Segovia from Miami, Josh Atencio from Colorado, Chris McVey of San Diego, and Ronald Donkor from RBNY. Eight matches into the season these players have 4 yellow cards each, so consider it a 50-50% prospect on whether they get another one and miss the second match. None seems essential enough to risk that.
Certain other player and positional characteristics predict rotation risk. Older players and the recently injured are riskier. Players who are essential cogs in their teams are less risky. Players in positions that run more or cover more ground – outside backs, wingbacks, box-to-box midfielders, and wingers – are riskier than goalkeepers, central attacking midfielders, essential defensive midfielders, centerbacks, and strikers. Some coaches rotate more than others, and again, players on teams that have played way too much are very risky.
How do I build my squad for this first Kickbase DGW?
Grinding together all of the above discussions – schedule, matchups, rotation risks, and other factors – help us make the sausage for the week. You must keep your team to the allowable formations, and I continue to emphasize minimizing the number of defenders and then maximizing the number of forwards allowed in any given Kickbase competition.
These are the players to target
- GK: Daniel, Collodi, St. Clair, Hoyos, Gavran, Blake
- DEF: Munie, Urhoghide, Kikanovic, Roberts (SJE), Laryea, Westfield, Micael, Gregerson, Jakob,
- MID: Tsakiris, Leroux, Luna, De Paul, Gozo, Mark Delgado, Maxi Moralez, Tverskov, Reus, Mehmeti, Bogusz, Evander
- FWD: Messi, Guilherme, Dreyer, Nico Fernandez, Werner/Bouda/Judd from SJE, Berterame, Musa, Solans, Pec
- Captain: Messi, Guilherme, Tsakiris
Should I consider any SGW players? This week in Kickbase, the one-word answer is “no.”
One final discussion on “chalk” – widely selected players – and differentials – riskier players that might give you an uncommon edge. Chalk players are often chalk for a reason; most managers will want Lionel Messi playing twice and not taking him is very risky. However, Kickbase gives us season-long or multi-week competitions and single week Rush events. I would overall emphasize a more conservative approach to the long-term competitions like the MLS Season Long Challenge. Missing out on widely held players that score well in a DGW can really set you behind, but having them if they score poorly is less of a problem if everyone else has them. The Rush challenges – being one-offs – are the best place to take a shot on your hidden gems and pet theories. Go for it!
Whatever plans you come up with, be sure to check the lineups you can check; the first six match lineups will appear in the hour before the game locks you into your choices at 7:30pm Eastern Time on Wednesday. That’s more than half of the most relevant players, way more than we get to see most weeks.
Godspeed and great joy as you tackle the first massive DGW of MLS 2026!
The “Fantasy Physician” is Ron Birnbaum, @Half Century City on Discord
The “Fantasy Therapist” is Mike Leister, @Kenobi on Discord
The “Fantasy Meteorologist” is Asher Malaschak, @Storminator on Discord
The “Fantasy Gastroenterologist” is Christian Ward, @xward on Discord
