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.
Tennis pros manage their teams while travelling on tour. Chess champion Magnus Carlsen once put in the hours to become a top-ranking FPL manager in his spare time. Former England cricket captain Stuart Broad accumulated such a monster score in a single week of FPL that the organisers sent him a commemorative mug; Broad later listed this as one of the top three sporting achievements of his life. Comedians manage teams. Rappers manage teams. Stormzy has a dedicated Twitter account that exists only for fantasy-football banter. During the season, he listens to a YouTubing sports psychologist called Ross “FPL Raptor” Dowsett, who shares selection tips every week. We know this because Stormzy’s former partner Maya Jama uploaded a video of one of their car journeys to social media. In the clip, Stormzy is utterly absorbed as Dowsett debates the pros and cons of investing in the Liverpool defender Trent Alexander-Arnold.
When I spoke to Jaswal at his agency recently, he was still processing his FPL exploits from the previous season. He said that when he climbed to the top spot he felt light-headed: “Couldn’t stop smiling for a week.” At the time, he mentioned his weird achievement to his adult daughter, Aarti, at a family meal. Aarti isn’t an FPL manager, so she wasn’t too fussed. But she mentioned it to some FPL-obsessed colleagues at work, and they fell silent – awestruck at what her dad had accomplished.
So many millions of people participate in the fantasy version of real football these days that success in the realm of FPL might actually be as unlikely as the chances of making it as a professional player. When Stormzy was asked which he’d prefer to see, his beloved Manchester United win the Premier League, or his own fake team win the fantasy equivalent, the rapper had to think for a long time before choosing United: “To not be selfish”. He sounded genuinely pained to leave behind the dream of winning at fantasy.
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What can we learn from the top-tier players of this game? What are the secrets of their success? First, it’s instructive to look at how we got here. “Ever fancied becoming a football manager? Well, premierleague.com can provide you with a chance to find out just what it’s like.” With these innocent words, back in August 2002, an addictive drug was loosed on an unsuspecting global public. About 70,000 people took part in that first season of Fantasy Premier League, which evolved out of similar, pencil-and-paper competitions that were popularised in the 1990s by the Daily Telegraph in the UK and Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy, as well as on the TV show Fantasy Football League, hosted by Frank Skinner and David Baddiel. A company called International Sports Multimedia (ISM) built the first version of the FPL software for the Premier League, having made similar tie-ins for other football organisations.
ISM handles the digital nuts and bolts of FPL today, pumping out weekly points that fantasy managers mostly gain through goals scored by real-life players, as well as goals created or goals denied. ISM also adjudicates a complicated set of rules, long established, that restrict the financial profligacy and the trigger-happy transfer policies of fantasy managers, while also imposing on their cobbled-together teams a sort of enforced diversity of talent, encouraging people to dig around in the lower reaches of the Premier League for bargains and under-feted stars. In this way, the side game acts as an ingenious temptation to enlarge commercial interest in the Premier League’s main product, the actual football.
I spoke to one fantasy manager, a 38-year-old scientist from Philadelphia called Bridget Curran, who had been introduced to FPL (and by extension English football) by her lab colleagues at Thomas Jefferson University. While pipetting substances between test tubes, she listened to their mysterious talk about goals being worth four points if scored by a striker, five points if scored by a midfielder, a magisterial six points if scored by a defender, these scores being doubled if a player had been made captain by their manager … and after hearing enough about it, she decided to take part herself, persuading her husband, Dominic, to do the same. They’ve both been managers since 2021, sometimes giving over entire family weekends to watching Premier League games they would never have dreamed of tuning in for otherwise.
Because of cases like Curran’s, it’s tempting to think of FPL as a brilliant example of ruthless corporate expansionism: yet another instance of cynical market growth. According to Jamie Reeves, a longtime FPL enthusiast who wrote an entertaining history of fantasy football for his website, fpltips.com, the Premier League initially buried its fantasy offering among other online novelties that included a Super-Mario-like platform game called Bounce Mania. By 2006, Bounce Mania was dead and there were more than 1m registered FPL teams. By 2018, there were more than 6m registered teams. Last season, there were 10.9m teams. Cynics might wonder, with bots and other shady internet practitioners in mind, how many of those 10.9m teams represented actual human participants. Nobody’s sure. According to figures provided to me by the Premier League, just under half of last season’s teams were still being actively managed, week to week, right until the competition’s conclusion in May.
What happened to the other 5m or more teams that were no longer being looked after by May? Why were they abandoned before the end of the season? I happen to be the right person to speculate about this, having abandoned every single one of my FPL teams for the last 15 years. I have done so for different reasons, out of pique, frustration, forgetfulness or self-pity, depending on the miserable circumstances of any one season. There is a natural attrition to this game, a gym membership effect whereby people’s honourable intentions to stick with something begin to weaken over time or in the face of adversity. The emotional blows dealt by FPL can be severe. They can be hard to recover from. August-to-May devotees may neglect their team for one weekend in winter or spring and suddenly, irretrievably, find themselves out of contention.
There are other forms of havoc wreaked by FPL. You may have a team and a crew of favoured players you cherish in reality. On any given weekend, these allegiances might end up at odds with your interests in FPL. When the two sets of passions collide, you can end up regretting your real-life team scoring a goal or winning a game because your fantasy team has suffered. Or you find yourself celebrating a hated rival’s defensive excellence, because in the fantasy space, points are now raining down.
Jaswal always organises his own fantasy teams according to a specific, self-imposed constraint. His team, Liverpool, are fierce rivals with Manchester United in real life, and their fans cannot stand one another. Jaswal hates United and because of this he won’t pick any of their players for his fantasy team, no matter how well those players are doing, no matter the stakes. When he became the No 1-ranked manager in the world last winter, he wondered if this would be the season he finally allowed himself to break his rule … But no, Jaswal decided, after hovering over a tempting Man United goalie. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he kept stuffing his lineup with players from all the other teams in the league, hoping for the best.
Every fantasy manager, by the way, has the opportunity to name their team. Jaswal called his Alexandra Greats, a riff on the name of his letting firm, Alexandra Property Group. There are often biographical breadcrumbs in the names people choose. I spoke to two young brothers in Oxford – I’ll call them Joe and Patrick – who invented a name by mashing together the names of the rival clubs they support in real life: Tottpool Rovers. If a name isn’t autobiographical, there tends to be some punning, pub-quiz aspect to it. Fee Fi Foden. Saka Potatoes. Catching on fast in her Philadelphia lab, Curran named her fantasy team Aston Martinez, in honour of the Aston Villa goalkeeper Emi Martínez.
One day recently, I spoke to Jonas Sand Låbakk, an economics student from Norway who has an FPL team named after his favourite sports bar in Oslo. Like Jaswal in Slough, Låbakk hovered around the fantasy managerial elite for much of last season. I wanted to know whether it was talent that separated the top-ranked FPL managers like him from the rest of the pack; or whether fantasy football is more of a swayable lottery, as I sometimes suspect in my funks – a poker game that combines some talent with lots of luck. Låbakk told me that, whatever the influence of good fortune, research and stamina are the main determinants of success. He studies data for hours. He watches all the games. The gigantic pool of participants means that any individual triumph in FPL really is a stunning, Olympic-podium-sized feat, at least in Låbakk’s opinion. “People who don’t understand FPL don’t understand quite what an achievement it is to do well,” he told me.
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Recently, a beleaguered fantasy manager in Manchester hired a billboard and used it to apologise to a whole city for his abysmal season-long performance in FPL. There is a subculture aspect of this game whereby groups of friends, relatives, colleagues and other acquaintances take each other on in mini-leagues: that is, smaller competitions that exist apart from the global contest. There might be rewards for the winners and forfeits for the losers (thus the billboard). As well as taking on the amassed might of 10.9m other teams in the overall standings last season, Låbakk was also comfortably monstering his dad and his best friend in a mini-league. Joe and Patrick, the schoolboys in Oxford, were competing against their dad and their dad’s friends. Curran, in Philadelphia, was up against her husband and her lab partners. When Ange Postecoglou became the head coach of Spurs, about a year ago, he felt he had to give up his longstanding FPL habit, pulling out of a mini-league in which he’d been competing against friends for 20 years. “They [still] try to grill me for information,” Postecoglou said at the time.
Insider trading does occur. In 2021, in the days leading up to a round of mid-season fixtures, it was noted that a group of Villa players had removed their then teammate, Jack Grealish, from their fantasy teams. So had the club physio. When Grealish was later confirmed to be injured, a scandal brewed. Villa’s manager at the time had to issue a ban on players and staff moonlighting in the fantasy realm. Erling Haaland, the Manchester City striker, has established himself as one of the most reliable points-gatherers in FPL history. Last season, about halfway through the league year, Haaland’s dad abruptly and inexplicably dropped his son from his own fantasy football team. Haaland’s brother and girlfriend did the same. Sure enough, Haaland proved to be injured.
You can fiddle with your team until just before the first kick-off of the week, so on that occasion Jaswal was able to scramble and replace Haaland from his fantasy team just in time to avoid losing points. In the fixture-dense middle phase of a season, being an FPL manager can feel like being a crisis consultant for a disgraced celebrity, with disasters begetting disasters. The choice of team captain, the demotion and promotion of fringe players to and from the subs’ bench, your strategic deployment of points-boosting fantasy tokens … these are all-important wrinkles in FPL, wrinkles that to outsiders might seem like trifling nonsense, but that can make or break weekends, sending smartphones, remote controls and transistor radios flying in celebration or despair.
In one of the many ways in which FPL mirrors life, the rich usually get richer in this game. If you are enjoying a prosperous season, with a comfortable number of points already banked, you can afford to make safe choices, selecting and elevating the most reliable players available. If you’re among the chasing pack, you have to take bigger risks. Instead of captaining goal-machine Haaland, for instance, you might find yourself having to hope for double points from an unheralded striker for Luton. You might gamble everything on the return-to-form of a fringe guy at Bournemouth. Because of this, seasons can cruelly implode in hours, weeks of work undone by a wrongly interpreted gut call, some misread data, a forgotten deadline, a dodgy thumb-press or misclick.
The agony of all this is there to be read in the mournful social-media posts and forum comments that wounded fantasy managers leave online. “Seriously considering quitting FPL” … “How can I take FPL less seriously?” … “To FPL or not to FPL?” … I realised I had to give up the game myself a couple of seasons ago, when I sulked through the entirety of a sunny weekend because Liverpool had just won 9-0 without any of the Liverpool players in my fantasy team accumulating points. Explaining why he had sworn off fantasy football recently, the author Richard Osman wrote on social media: “My weekends are now so much less fraught … I’m not constantly upset that [journeyman defender] Lucas Digne has been yellow-carded or something.”
There are certain figures in the Premier League who (between grumbling fantasy managers, at least) bear huge amounts of resentment. Take the Southampton defender Jan Bednarek, who dealt out unprecedented FPL misery back in 2021 when he scored an own goal and got red-carded in one match. Since missing a penalty against Liverpool in 2020, the City midfielder Kevin De Bruyne has won the Premier League multiple times, the Champions League too. But it’s that bloody penalty I think of whenever I see his face. It was a dozen-point swing for me, Kev!
For the managers who survive all this, consensus coagulates. The highest ranking FPL managers always end up with teams that resemble each other. In the run-in towards May, these managers speak more of differentials, differentiators, the tiny decisions that are made around the edges of their team, mining them points that others might have missed. With five weeks to go last season, Låbakk had to take a risk if he wanted to gain ground on Jaswal and the managers ahead of him. The Norwegian was ill at the time with pneumonia. He was falling behind in his studies. He made a fevered, frankly inspired decision to bring in the temperamental Chelsea striker Nicolas Jackson – “a huge risk”, as Låbakk later explained, “because Jackson was only one yellow card away from a suspension. I went against the data there. But it turned out great. Jackson scored a goal and got two assists, and I was the only manager in the Top 100 who had him.”
Jacksonless in Slough, Jaswal felt the first stirrings of defeat. He had been playing FPL for more than a decade. He’d never had a season anywhere near as good as this one, he told me. Now, “the pack was catching up. And some of the decisions I made didn’t work out … I’m 55 years old. I’ve been there and done it in life. But it was hard, relying on those players, those differentials. My colleague at the office was saying to me, ‘I think you might have to get a Man United player in!’ I said, ‘No! I won’t. I can’t.’”
Actually, in the end, it was a striker for Crystal Palace who doomed Jaswal’s season. “Jean-Philippe Mateta,” he sighed. “My downfall.” A single player’s mistake can kill you, but there’s even more agony in the beautiful, God-touched performance by the player you don’t select. In April, Palace’s Mateta scored four goals and registered one assist, accumulating 29 points for the fantasy managers who had him in their teams. The brothers in Oxford, Joe and Patrick, were among those who had brought in Mateta in time. They surged to second place in their dad’s mini-league, finishing the season above him. In the lab at Thomas Jefferson, Curran, boosted by Mateta as well, finished her season in 7,980th place. This made her one of the top female managers in the game, according to the administrators of FPL. Jaswal finished fifth, still high enough to be sent a few nice prizes, including a tablet computer, a backpack and a couple of keyrings. He gave these to his daughter and the rest of his family.
In Norway, Låbakk had recovered from pneumonia just in time. Mateta’s big week helped him rise to No 1. He had to let a crucial accounting exam fall by the wayside to secure the championship; but oh well. FPL’s administrators sent Låbakk various electronic goodies and promised to bring him to England to watch some live games. “I’ll just have to live with that C in accounting,” he told me, during the summer break between seasons.
I asked Låbakk if he had any plans to retire, leaving fantasy football on the highest of possible highs. No, he said. “I can’t imagine my life without it.” In fact, he continued, he had his eye on other countries’ versions of FPL to get him through the summer. There was a Norwegian equivalent, as well as a Swedish one. He’d been dabbling with a version of fantasy football based on the League of Ireland. Låbakk didn’t know any of the players. He hadn’t heard of any of the teams. But never mind, he told me. There was always the chance to dig in and learn.
When the new season’s FPL competition did begin last month, I looked him up in the rankings. Jaswal too. Neither of them will have been surprised that success one year does not guarantee it the next. It was still early days, but they were ranked 1,901,525th and 3,130,406th respectively, with lots of work yet to do.
