La Liga Draft

The era

No league has sent more distinct great teams to a European final than Spain. Cruyff's Dream Team and the first European Cup at Wembley, Real Madrid's Galácticos and their four-in-seven Champions League run, Barcelona's two trebles and the passing side between them, Valencia's back-to-back finals, and the Atlético team that came within a minute of the trophy. The pool is concentrated by design — the great Spanish sides came from few clubs, and pretending otherwise would misrepresent the era.

Among the squads you can land on: Barcelona 2010-11, Real Madrid 2016-17 and Barcelona 2014-15.

How it drafts

The strongest pool in the game. Twenty players rated 90 or above out of thirteen squads, so a decent draft here produces a genuinely frightening XI. Worth knowing before you compare results: a run in this pool averages a few percent above the full-database score — well inside the swing of a single unlucky knockout tie, but a real edge.

The wheel only ever serves squads from this pool, so all 13 of them come up often enough to matter — the whole point of narrowing it. The strongest player you can land on is Lionel Messi (97), and the best XI the pool could theoretically assemble averages 94.5. You will not get that XI: you get whatever the wheel gives you, one squad at a time, and you have to build around it.

Runs in this pool count on the global leaderboard exactly like any other — there is no scoring penalty for narrowing the wheel. See how a run works if you haven't played before, or start from the top of the football draft game.