Celebrities play it. Footballers play it. Gradually, insidiously, fantasy football has seeped into the way we consume the game
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erhaps 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.
