Euro 2016 Fantasy Football: The Moneyball method for picking your ultimate team for the tournament in France

Wondering who you should pick in your Euro 2016 fantasy team? We’ve got you covered.

You can download our Fantasy Football app below if you still need to get your team started and then you'll need to start making the tough calls over who makes the cut.

We have taken a leaf out of Billy Beane’s Moneyball philosophy and analysed a ream of statistics from the Euro 2016 qualifiers to help you decide where the smart money is in this year’s tournament.

This philosophy won’t necessarily identify the BEST players. We all know that Bale, Ronaldo, Muller, Lewandowski etc. are at the top of the pile. The purpose of this is to allow you to make the best choices for those awkward-to-fill slots at the end when money is tight.

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Keepers and defenders

Good value: Vlad Chiriches of Romania (Image: Alex Grimm - UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

Whichever fantasy league competition you’re entering, it pays to have a goalkeeper and defenders who are guaranteed to start and who play for teams that are tight at the back.

Defensive players also tend to be relatively cheap so picking the backline is the perfect opportunity to save some money for spending on the headline-grabbers later on.

Based on their performances in qualifying Romania emerged as the most defensively solid team of the 24 to have qualified this time around. They only conceded two goals in their 10 games, albeit in a fairly weak group.

Their keeper, Ciprian Tătăruşanu, who plays for Fiorentina in Italy, started nine of these games making him a good (and probably quite cheap) bet between the posts.

In defence Napoli defender Vlad Chiricheş and Al-Sailiya’s (a Qatar side) Grigore Dragoş were both mainstays, starting and finishing every single one of the 10 matches.

Of course, it’s foolish to put all your defensive eggs in one basket. After Romania, England and Spain had the next best defensive records with each keeping eight clean sheets in 10 games. However their lineups are harder to predict.

Wales and Ukraine also put in solid defensive displays with both their keepers (Wayne Hennessey and Andriy Pyatov) starting every game in qualifying.

At the other end of the scale the Czech Republic had the worst defensive record in qualifying, conceding 1.4 goals per game and failing to keep a single clean sheet. Poland were also poor defensively, conceding one a game.

Midfielders

Midfield choice: Gylfi Sigurdsson (Image: Getty Images)

As far as midfielders go, you’ve got to invest in goal scorers.

Iceland’s Gylfi Sigurdsson is a stand-out performer in this regard with six goals in qualifying (35% of Iceland’s total) and appearances in all 10 of their games. Crucially he’s also a penalty-taker.

Croatia’s Ivan Perišić and Slovakia’s Marek Hamšík were similarly prolific for their nations with six and five goals respectively.

You’d also be wise to keep an eye on Austria’s David Alaba who generally plays for Bayern Munich in defence but bagged four goals playing as an attacking midfielder in qualifying.

Strikers

Main man: Kyle Lafferty of Northern Ireland

Just as with your midfielders, you need your strikers to find the back of the net.

The big guns really stand out in this category with Bale scoring 64% of Wales’ goals, Zlatan Ibrahimović scoring 53% of Sweden’s and Cristiano Ronaldo scoring 45% of Portugal’s.

When it came to scoring goals in qualifying Poland and (whisper it) England (again) were the standout teams each putting away more than three goals per game on average.

However, given that Vardy, Kane, Rooney and Lewandowski are likely to be pretty expensive it's worth delving a little deeper to pick out some cheaper options.

You might not have seen him due to the shadow of his more illustrious team mate but Poland’s Arkadiusz Milik scored six goals in qualifying, starting in nine of Poland’s 10 fixtures.

If Kyle Lafferty was fit then he’d be a great option, having scored 44% of Northern Ireland’s goals in qualifying while Austria’s Marc Janko and Russia’s Artem Dzyuba both scored a significant portion of their team’s goals in qualifying, playing in a large proportion of their games.

Teams unlikely to score many goals are Wales, Hungary and Romania who all averaged just 1.1 per game in the qualifiers.

Bearing all this in mind, here’s our Moneyball-style squad along with their key stats from qualifying (excluding play-offs). It came in well under budget.