GUIDE / JANUARY
The winter repair auction
January's auction is a different animal from August's: shorter, more decisive and easier to get wrong.
When to hold it
The natural moment is right after the winter transfer window closes, in early February. Earlier means buying players who may still move; later means handing two or three rounds to whoever already has a settled squad.
It belongs in the calendar from the start, not decided in December. A repair auction announced in September changes how the first half is played.
Ninety minutes is realistic for eight teams. It is not a full auction: few players and little money move.
The three usual formats
First, release and re-auction: every team frees a fixed number of players, all of them go into one pool and are auctioned again with remaining credits. It is the fairest and the most fun, and the only one that gives a second chance to whoever got August wrong.
Second, free market: buy from players never assigned, with no releases. Fast, but it rewards teams that are already good and still have credits.
Third, direct trades between teams. It works only in small leagues among people who know each other, because it needs trust.
Credits: the crux of the whole thing
The question that splits every league is whether to use leftover credits from August or hand out new ones. Leftovers reward whoever saved; new credits reopen the season.
The middle path, and the most used, is an equal top-up — twenty or thirty on a base of five hundred — added to whatever remains.
Decide it in August, with the rest of the rules. Deciding in January means deciding when everyone already knows what suits them.
How many players can move
Three or four out of twenty-five works: enough to fix a bad auction, not enough to rebuild. Raising it to six or seven turns the repair into a full auction and makes the first half of the season pointless.
A per-role cap is worth adding too: no more than two players in the same role, so nobody rebuilds a whole department.
The most important constraint is the final squad: after the repair everyone must have the exact number of players per role. Obvious, and forgotten every year by someone.
January's typical mistakes
The first is paying for current form. A player with three goals in four games costs double in January, and half the time those three goals were his whole season.
The second is ignoring the calendar. Few rounds remain: a player returning from injury in three weeks is worth far less than he was in August.
The third is releasing the wrong players. Whoever frees their worst four often frees the only reliable starter in a role where nothing better is available.
What to read next
League rules
League rules already written and editable: squad, auction, scoring, repair auction and the disputes worth settling early.
ToolBudget split
How many credits per role, and how many to keep aside so you can still fill every slot.
ToolPrintable auction sheet
One sheet per team: a row for every squad slot, with columns for spent and remaining credits.