Triumph and disaster for you, soft power for the Premier League: fantasy football is back

The Guardian

5 days ago

Perhaps you're a template kind of guy. Perhaps, by contrast, you're spurning the triple Liverpool consensus and stacking your team with handy differentials like Jarrod Bowen and Donyell Malen. Perhaps even Erling Haaland could be considered a differential given his historically low current ownership stats. Perhaps you're feeling a cheeky BB GW1, followed by a FH GW2. Perhaps, by contrast, you're furiously stabbing at the 'close tab' button on your browser in the hope of purging these words from your eyes as expeditiously as possible.
In which case, relax. This is actually a column about sport: what it is, what it isn't, how we watch it, where it's going. Most important, you can rest assured I shall not be relating any details of my Fantasy Premier League exploits, for the same reason I will not be sharing my dreams, my Wordle stats or the contents of my belly button. However fascinating you may find your own, it is genuinely no excuse for wasting anybody else's time.
At which point, we may just have lost the other half of the audience. Because there does seem to be a weird cultural divide over this stuff: a kind of snobbery/infantilism binary. So you get the increasingly prevalent view that obsessing over made-up teams in a made-up game is basically trite nonsense, the stuff of civilisational downfall, a parasite on the body of football. Often these accusations will be levelled by the very same people who argue that shouting at horses to run faster somehow constitutes the highest form of sporting endeavour.
And then at the other end of the scale you have the argot and arcana of the self-styled 'FPL community': a weird, idiosyncratic and above all deeply obsessive place, a rabbit hole of game theory and sprawling colour-coded spreadsheets, where grown men are brought to the brink of insanity by late fixture rearrangements, where Eddie Howe press conference footage is parsed in microscopic detail. Did he say Anthony Gordon 'is being assessed' or 'has been assessed'? Please. My family is dying.
People earn their living from fantasy football these days. People write PhDs on it. There are interminable FPL podcasts, FPL YouTube channels, bespoke analysis tools, live events. Younger fans, who we constantly hear have little appetite for 90-minute games, will spend many multiples of that watching a bloke on a webcam in his mum's kitchen weighing up the merits of Murillo v Ola Aina, or whether Cody Gakpo constitutes a rotation risk.
Even traditional media have begun to take the hint. FPL content has infiltrated the Sky Sports News ticker, the BBC Sport website, the Google search algorithm, player interviews, radio commentary. Celebrities play it. Footballers play it. Ange Postecoglou dolefully admitted on arriving at Tottenham that he'd been forced to leave his friends' fantasy league for the first time in 20 years. Gradually, insidiously, fantasy football has seeped into the way we cover and consume football: a shadow game that has become almost inimical to the real thing. In a way this is a development that has taken place in parallel with the Premier League itself. Frank Skinner's and David Baddiel's Fantasy Football League was first broadcast in 1993, the Daily Telegraph introduced its seminal play-by-mail game in 1994, and in hindsight these were the first evolutionary twirls of what we now have to describe as the EPL global cinematic universe. Games, jokes, daydreams and deep dives, idle chatter and hot takes: an empire of content centred on the weekend fixture list but slowly rumbling into every corner of our lives.
For the Premier League itself, the game and its 11 million players constitute not so much a revenue stream – the game is free to play and always has been – as a kind of awesome soft power. In an age when viewers are increasingly selective about the football they watch, fantasy football gives every minute of every game a certain relevance. Whether Bournemouth claim a late consolation while losing 3-0 at Manchester City has almost zero relevance in the real world. But if you're counting on a Josko Gvardiol clean sheet, you may just carry on watching to the very end.
And so fantasy sport occupies a kind of strange middle status: utterly contingent on the action while somehow entirely detached from it. In this regard it is not a million miles from the fan fiction and user-generated narratives that populate so many youth-oriented subcultures, a way of putting your own stamp on the game, a vehicle for expression and cognition, a way of being an active participant rather than a passive consumer.
Naturally the whiff of condescension will always follow fantasy football, in the same way video games have always been regarded as a lower and more banal form of cultural output. But frankly, is it any less valid a way of consuming Premier League football than the other forms of obsession associated with it? Is it any more trivial or frivolous than living vicariously through transfer gossip, or writing long boring threads about football accountancy, or taking an interest in who Morgan Gibbs-White's partner has decided to unfollow on Instagram, or where referees come from?
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Like all forms of mass culture, football generates hinterlands in abundance. Perhaps in a certain light it is possible to see fantasy football as the least toxic of them: not as aggressive as social media discourse, not as socially harmful as gambling, not as demented as conspiracy theory. For its most devoted practitioners it offers a form of community and agency, a weekly microdose of triumph and disaster, an emotional stake in a game that so often regards its fans as raw consumers.
At least, for now. As with anything wildly popular, the explosion of FPL has been accompanied by the usual agents of greed and grift, exploitation and opportunism. Money leagues, while theoretically banned, continue to flourish. The market in artificial intelligence tools and insider knowledge, paywalled by premium subscriptions, has gone through the roof. In recent years professional poker players have increasingly begun to migrate to FPL.
Meanwhile the passageway from fantasy sport to problem gambling is smoothed by the numerous betting companies targeting FPL content for advertising and partnerships.
And perhaps none of this has ever moved you in the slightest, never has, never will. But on some level FPL does articulate what has always been one of the great unexplored tensions in football. To what extent do the ephemera and subcultures of a sport enrich the true essence of the game, and to what extent do they dilute it? What happens when the sideshow dissolves into the main show? Established as a harmless bit of fun, built through community, grown through popular demand, and now under assault by big money and big tech: on reflection, perhaps fantasy football is a pretty good model for the game itself.