How Fantasy Champions League works and crucial differences from FPL you need to know

Have you ever found yourself watching the Champions League and noticed the void in your life from not having to ask 'who got the assist?' after every single goal?

Well, don't worry, because you can get that experience if you take part in Fantasy Champions League.

A lot of it is very straightforward and similar to Fantasy Premier League - but before you get picking your team, there's some unique rules you should be aware of...

How Fantasy Champions League works

The basic setup with feel extremely familiar to those of you who play Fantasy Premier League: you get €100m to spend on a 15-player squad of two goalkeepers, five defenders, five midfielders and three forwards.

Each gameweek you get a certain number of free transfers, with a four-point penalty for each player over the limit. You only score points for the players in your first XI. Anyone who doesn't play at all gets automatically replaced from the bench (with an asterisk - we'll get to that in a second). Captains get double points.

So far, so familiar. But there are a few crucial differences on top that you should be aware of. First, the deadline for changes is when the first game of the matchday kicks off.

But the biggest difference, perhaps, is that you can choose to manually make substitutions or change your captain if they have already played and you don't like how they've done.

That means if your centre-forward or skipper has a stinker on the Tuesday night, you can sub them out and/or hand the armband to someone else who is yet to play on the Wednesday night.

The catch is that once you have made that change, you're committed to it; you can't go back, and no automatic substitutions will take at all - even if one of your players ends up not playing.

You should be particularly wary that even just changing the captain or changing the order of your subs counts as a manual change - so don't do that and expect the automatic subs to be made, because they won't.

The other big difference takes the knockout format later on in the Champions League into account, which affects the number of transfers you're allowed to make from week to week and how many players you're allowed to have from any one club. Oh - and you get another €5m to spend on your squad in the knockout phase, reflecting the fact that many of the cheap players will have been eliminated.

In the league phase you're allowed two transfers per matchday, but that rises to five before the first legs of the quarter-finals, semi-final and final.

In between legs in the round of 16, quarters and semis, you get a further three free transfers to make ahead of the second leg. (In between the two legs of the knockout phase play-offs, it's only two free transfers).

One unused free transfer per gameweek can be rolled over into the next game week, but they do not accumulate over the season, so no point trying to stockpile.

There's also effectively two wildcard windows in which you can make unlimited transfers: after the league phase is over, and before the round of 16. That basically allows you to select a whole new team just for the knockout phase play-offs, which makes sense, as eight of the teams left in the competition skip that stage and go straight to the round of 16.

We're not going to through the entire scoring system, but it's almost identical to the Fantasy Premier League system. You can check it out for yourself on your own time.

There are prizes available but what they are or how to win them is yet to be announced. It's sponsored by PlayStation, though, so we imagine that's a clue.