One Saturday afternoon last February, a letting agent from Slough called Sundeep Jaswal sat down to watch Sheffield United play Aston Villa on TV. A lifelong Liverpool fan in his mid-50s, Jaswal had no interest in rooting for either team; but he did want one player, Villa’s Ollie Watkins, to perform as well as possible. Every year since the late 2000s, Jaswal had entered the Premier League’s annual points-gathering competition, Fantasy Premier League, or FPL, which runs concurrently with the top-flight English season and rewards armchair managers such as Jaswal for their foresight when it comes to anticipating which professional footballers will play well from week to week. For many football fans, the fantasy has come to assume as much importance as the reality. Jaswal was one FPL manager among 10,904,158 registered as entrants in last season’s competition. He had backed Watkins, that February afternoon, and when the striker scored a goal and set up two more, Jaswal climbed up the global ranks to become the top fantasy manager in the world.
No 1! It put him above professional coaches and sporting insiders. It put him above number-crunching mathematicians and city traders. It put him above podcasters, bloggers, livestreamers and other content creators who have devoted entire new-media careers to breaking down the action in real-life Premier League matches, but only as this action pertains to the strange, data-driven contest being conducted on smartphones and desktop computers on the margins. When Jaswal rose to the top, he was looking down on actual footballers who have FPL teams they tend to with care. (Sometimes these pros pick themselves to feature. Sometimes, they don’t.) All around the UK, Ireland, the US, Egypt, Nigeria, Malaysia and Kenya – the nations with the highest recorded levels of FPL obsession – colleagues compete with colleagues, partners vie with partners, parents try to crush their kids.
