The Friday before the first game of the Premier League season brings about more fear and dread than a fan can stand.
Not because of the football though – there are darker forces at play.
It’s that week of the year again! The constant pressure via email, text or WhatsApp.
“Have you paid your fiver?”
“Don’t forget to join my league”
Yes – like the rest of us I to will be attempting to put together a wittier team name than ‘Inter Your Mam’ and then try to guess who will be starting on the opening weekend so I get the mythical benefit of a ‘good start.’
I cannot wait for the return of another league season but the pressure of fantasy football had brought about a sense of trepidation that seems to increase every year.
This year has the added pressure of starting with a Friday night game which will undoubtedly catch out millions of us who forgot!
And with head to head leagues, draft leagues and lord knows what other versions of the game available it only becomes more of a nightmare every season.
The transfer fees of this window mean the days of a Michu turning up and firing you to glory are slim and it is very difficult to decipher who is going to play and perform in the early going.
But when you get down to it there are very different types of fantasy footballer!
Which manager are you?
The nine out of ten
No we are not talking effort and good management scores here!
We are talking about the 90% of us who set up our team and within three weeks never log back on to bother checking it or make transfers.
With the best will in the world it is a chore for even the most ardent football fan to maintain a successful fantasy football team for a whole season.
We’ve all picked Aguero, Sigurdsson & Azpilicueta and we’re all destined to fail.
By mid-September the vast majority of us have consigned the constant stream of reminder emails to the junk folder and couldn’t give two hoots whether Jermaine Defoe scores a hat trick or not.
You may revisit it for the wild card in January out of idle curiosity but let’s be honest. Most of us have forgotten our password by the first international break and removed ourselves from the league WhatsApp group.
You've got no excuses now…
The Statistician
Every league has one. The boffin who spends far too much time working out who is the best by numbers and who likes you to know all about it when ‘maths is the real winner.’
The sad part is that they spend so much time on this that the benefit of winning is actually lost given how many wasted hours they have spent calculating who to pick and when to use their triple captain all to win fifty quid.
The only stat that should be pointed out to the sad buggers is how much money they could have earned if they’d put the same amount of hours into a more profitable aside - like betting on the nags or actual paid employment.
The blagger
There is always one in every league who knows nothing about the beautiful game yet somehow manages to breeze through the season at the top of the table.
You look quizzically at them when they tell you they’ve put Swansea’s keeper in this weekend just before they cause the upset of the season and said stopper saves two penalties.
They somehow managed to put their triple captain on Sergio Aguero when he scored five against Newcastle and used their bench boost when all three subs actually played and had blinders!
Ye they wouldn’t know a Mitre Delta if it hit them square in the face from a Kolorov free kick! Infuriating.
The Unknown
That person who nobody actually knows but somehow spoils all the fun by winning the league they aren’t even meant to have joined in the first place.
They always have an excellent team name, put the rest of you all to shame ruining the season for us all and then disappear off the face of the earth the next season.
They usually turn out to be a work experience kid you gave the code to after a few pints on a Friday or somebody who works with you that somehow had the code passed on to them despite having never ever conversed with you in their existence.
