A Hopeful And Hopeless Farce

Not even 10 games into the new Premier League season, and everything is already starting to piss me off. The initial optimism — the spirit of hope that kickstarts each new season before it slowly starts to dissolve — has worn off. And one of the things on that list of piss-off triggers for me, though it's somewhere near the bottom, is the FPL. I hate it. (But I also love it.)

I spent many childhood years aimlessly changing formations and strategies on those Football Manager computer games, as well as its cricket equivalent, the name of which I don’t remember. I started playing fantasy football around 15 years ago, when the internet became more of a thing, and it was so much fun. I’m a bit of a self-styled football analyst — a friend and I have even discussed, and agreed, that the two of us should be the new joint Directors of Football at Man Utd — though I’m humble enough to concede that maybe I’m not very good at it.

But at the same time, I’ve always had a slightly uncomfortable relationship with the FPL. I’m morally opposed to the game, for reasons best described as farty and highfalutin. I probably shouldn’t get into them here but this is my blog (not yours) so here goes: the very concept of FPL is antithetical to the real thing. 

It makes you root for a minimum of eight players who you absolutely do not support in real life. Your own success in the game is predicated on the success, often, of teams you hate. And you start watching games in a very different way, focussing on individuals and their impact on the play, rather than the play itself. My views on football loyalty are painfully inflexible — I suspect a therapist might even deem them to be unhealthy. But until I get help, I will continue to believe that there is a kind of purity in supporting your club, a kind of moral virtue perhaps (for lack of less judgy phrases).* That sticking to them no matter how shit they get becomes a part of my — and other supporters’ — own identity. Wanting complete strangers to win a game on TV, feeling good about their victory or, more importantly, suffering with them as they lose, is the joy of sport. At its heart, sport is a nonsense, a hopeful and hopeless farce.

And FPL questions this very foundational basis of watching football. But — crucially — it’s also so much fun! I got sucked into it last season after like 12 years of abstaining, but now I’m back in it. And it makes me very uncomfortable. So I’ve found a little compromise here by creating a self-imposed restriction on my team.

Here’s how it goes: Every single starting 11 of mine will have the maximum allowed quota of three United players, one of whom will always be the captain. I will stuff my squad with as many Leicester City players as I can, given that they’re my designated “second team”. And the only Liverpool player allowed in my team will be Mo Salah (because I like that curly selfish bastard) — in fairness, I let Sadio Mane in a few times last year because I’m weak.  

This would have been a decent enough restriction to place except that Man Utd sucks now. We’re well and truly in the shitter, and I’ve made my peace with that (while still retaining that neverending strain of hope). But relevant here is the fact that my club’s inherent shittiness absolutely destroys my FPL prospects. While people all around me are picking up double points after double points with Kane, Auba, KDB, or whoever, my loser team is plodding along embarrassing itself and me — as I have to suffer through my friends Rashford and James giving me solid 2s and 4s and ruining each weekend of mine. ‘Twas ever thus.

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* A club thousands of kilometres away, supported simply because they were on TV when I was a kid and something about them clicked with my still-developing brain, a club with whom my real-world connection is, um, tenuous. But support them I must.