How to structure your weekend league

With Team Of The Season and some of the most hard fought weekend leagues coming up, it is a good time to talk about how to approach your 30 games for the week and specifically 20 games on the weekend after you qualified. By properly distributing your matches and taking breaks in between, you can increase concentration and consistency and therefore achieve better results.

Take your time The most important foundation for a good performance is taking your time as best as possible. The vast majority of us are not FIFA pros and so we most likely have other responsibilities that are more important than playing the game. However when you do decide to play, then it should be in moments when you’re not stressed, have time available and can calmly focus on your matches.

This starts with your 10 qualification games already. If qualifying is a struggle for you or you’re not super consistent with it yet, then don’t leave your 10 games for a Thursday evening or Friday morning. Spreading them out to 2-3 matches per evening for example will allow you to play your best and be 100% focused for every single game.

Taking breaks The same is true for your 20 finals games. Of course due to the reduced number that we have to play nowadays (compared to the 40 and 30 matches per weekend it was before), it is a lot easier to finish your weekend league. And with that, session rhythm and structure have become less important.

However it’s still 20 games of FIFA and ideally you shouldn’t be playing them in one sitting. My preferred range for one playing session has always been 3-5 games. I think that within that range you are able to find your rhythm and then play almost every match with peak concentration and performance. Beyond that range you will most likely see a decline in focus and start making some mistakes. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you will lose, but the likelihood of losing is going to be higher.

Experiment for yourself, how long you can stay focused for and what therefore is the ideal number of matches in a session. Also note that taking a break doesn’t mean you have to stop playing for hours. Sometimes a little break of 5 minutes in between matches can help to stay fresh longer. Another approach could be short sessions of 3 games with 15-20 minute breaks in between.

Dealing with losses Naturally a loss is going to be more taxing on your mental than a win. Feelings of frustration or even tilt can occur and those are not going to be helpful in terms of winning your next games. I would ALWAYS recommend taking a break after a loss.

When a Top100 placement back in the day allowed for 1-3 losses only, I would usually not play any more matches for the day if I lost one. That might sound extreme, but the more of an effect a loss has on your mental, the longer the break should be. Don’t underestimate how long it can take to fully reset and head into your next game without being affected by the previous result.

Now obviously as soon as you lose more than three games on average per weekend league (which is true for the vast majority of players), this strategy is no longer applicable. Still you should resist the urge to right away search for the next match after a loss due to wanting to “do it better”. This type of pattern can quickly end up in tilting if the next game is not going your way.

Let’s say you sit down for a session of 5 games (which you have to play due to your schedule) and you lose the second one. Take a 10 minute break, that should always be possible. Either do something you enjoy that takes your mind off of the game or watch a pro player who inspires you or rewatch a good match of yours to find some inspiration. Whatever helps you to forget the outcome of the last match and start fresh into the next. The better you are able to treat each game as an individual performance, the easier it is going to be for you to become consistent.

Let me know in the comments below how your typical weekend league schedule looks like. I would be very interested to know!

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About the author Georg "CruZzAve" Raffelt is creating tutorials since 2013 around which time he also started his competitive journey in the game. He was able to qualify for the Grand Final of the German National Championship "Virtuelle Bundesliga" twice in 2014 and 2015. Online he managed to reach the weekly and monthly Top100 in the Weekend League numerous times.

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