Give the ball to Solano! (fantasyleague.com)

Member Name: Scott Fowler

Product:	fantasyleague.com
Date:	21/08/02 (165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: New interest in meaningless games

Disadvantages: Someone else has Henry!

The Premiership is back, there’s no escaping that fact if you happen to have Sky. At every opportunity you are reminded of the fact and just how many live games are being shown this season (around 100). 100 games? Surely that’s too many? Well yes it probably is, and we’ll end up one week with West Brom v Birmingham and really who, other than fans of either club, will want to watch that?

Enter fantasy football, where even the most meaningless game takes on new significance. Can your Birmingham defender keep a clean sheet, or perhaps even snatch a goal from a corner, or will your West Brom striker you picked up for a bargain score a hat-trick. It sheds a completely different light on the game and you know what? It’s great! You actually find yourself urging teams to pass the ball to YOUR players.

For the last few years 6 of my friends and myself have been participating in a fantasy football league. We use fantasyleague.com and their professional league option. For the uninitiated this involves all the managers getting together for an auction. Each manger is given a budget of, say £50m and they take it in turns to bid for players of their choice. Only one team can have Henry, so how much are you willing to spend on one player? (He went for £22m in our auction). This is probably the most important part of the entire process and a good laugh into the bargain. You basically all get together in one place and have an alcohol-fuelled auction that can last around 4 hours. Obviously when it comes to the end you may be a bit worse for wear, explaining why you have that Birmingham defender or West Brom striker!

If you run out of money at the auction you have to wait until everyone else has no money and then the managers take it in turn to pick “free transfers” from the remaining list. You have to pick a team of 11 players and 4 substitutes, so it’s likely you’ll need a few free transfers at the end, but de
pending on your league size there are usually a few pretty good players left (we had Laurent Robert & Robert Pires left last season).

As well as picking your team, the auction is the place to set your leagues rules in place. You can customize the rules in any way you please, you could create transfer windows, decide when substitutions will be allowed, limit the number of transfers allowed per team per month/season etc.

Once you’ve had your auction you have the choice of playing via post or on the Internet. We use the Internet option, which costs £25 per manager. The chairman then has the unenviable task of logging everyone’s team and paying for the league (a word of warning – get money from your friends up front!). When this is completed each manager receives a password (everyone has the same password to start with, but you can change it whenever you like) and your league receives a PIN. That’s it you’re ready to go!

The website is well designed and very easy to navigate. From it you can control everything about your team, make transfers and substitutes even change your team badge. There is a new feature this year called “Supersubs” which gives you the option of picking the subs you want to make for all of the weekends games, ensuring you don’t accidentally leave Owen on the bench for that Sunday game. Also new to the league this year is a live points updates, where you can see how everyone is doing as the goals fly in on Saturday afternoon. As well as information about your league the website also contains a whole host of useful features. There are details of each teams squads, recent transfers and match reports to name but a few.

The points system is very simplistic, with 3 points awarded for a clean sheet (goalkeepers and defenders only) 2 points for a goal assist and 3 points for a goal. It very straightforward and I think works very well.

So there you go, fantasyleague.
com gets a big thumbs up from everyone in our league. Give it a try yourself!

Summary: