Fantasy football and the desperate search for the game we lost

For all the sniffiness and the nerdery, fantasy football manages to recreate many of the things the real thing was supposed to provide. A sense of community. Something to talk about. Something to agonise over. A stake invented, to replace the one we lost

When we talk about the great cheating scandals in sport - Lance Armstrong and US Postal, Calciopoli, Bloodgate - it occurs to me that there’s one salient example that has flown somewhat under the radar, by dint of its relatively limited scope, and the fact that its only real victims were about a dozen disgruntled newspaper sub-editors and writers in an office in London. Nonetheless, to my mind it deserves a special place in the pantheon: owing partly to its evil genius, and partly to what it tells us about ourselves.

The tale goes back about seven or eight years, to when I was a junior reporter at another newspaper, where - in common with many offices - we had a staff Fantasy Premier League pool, played for relatively small stakes but contested with the ferocity of an Old Firm derby. Edges were keenly sought; intelligence fiercely guarded. And at one point, it became clear that one of the senior football correspondents - who I have been reluctantly informed by the lawyers must remain nameless - seemed to possess a mysterious sixth sense for which players were going to start for their clubs at the weekend, and which would be left out or injured.

As it turned out, this correspondent was using his access to pre-match press conferences to ask Premier League managers - within the sanctity of the embargoed Sunday newspaper briefing - which of the players in his fantasy team were in line to play, and which were carrying minor niggles that might put them out of contention. Armed with this privileged intel, he would then sneakily make his transfers before the gameweek deadline, helping him to carve out an unassailable lead we simply assumed was a product of his unquestionable genius.

I’ll spare you the grisly details of the fallout: the adamant denials, the kangaroo court, the regrettable cancellation of the following season’s staff league. But the entire episode is a reminder of the uniquely addling appeal of Fantasy Premier League, which as it nears its third decade of existence remains a curiously unexamined phenomenon, one whose irrepressible popularity may tell us a little about our shifting relationship with Big Sport in the current age.

At which point your eyes may well already be beginning to glaze over, and for one of two main reasons. One is the immutable iron law of fantasy sports: however engaging you may personally find your own exploits, there is nothing more boring than hearing somebody else talk about theirs. In this respect, fantasy teams are a little like dreams, children and your sex life: you may very well find your own fascinating, but for heaven’s sake keep it to yourself.

The second is the strange and vaguely supercilious social stigma that still attaches itself to fantasy football: the idea that it is one of the baser cultural forms, unworthy of discussing in polite company, and certainly not the sort of thing that belongs in the proper sports pages. Even now, I can sense the hot, tutting disapproval of ‘Big’ Jim McGerrigan, chief sports writer of the Daily Fandango between 1962 and 1997, wondering what on earth has become of sportswriting these days when the kids are scribbling columns about this fantasy rubbish, whilst simultaneously trying to convince you with an entirely straight face that the act of putting little men on horses and shouting at them to go faster is somehow the ‘Sport of Kings’.

The truth is that, like computer gaming, fantasy football has been shaping our consumption of the real thing for years, and shows no sign of waning. The current season of Fantasy Premier League can boast more than six million participants, which is more people than actually go to watch Premier League football. The FPL bandwagon has spawned podcasts, television shows, acres of internet content, actual books written by actual people and published by actual publishers on actual paper. The Saudi prince Abdullah bin Musa’ad bin Abdul Aziz once admitted to being so engrossed in the fortunes of his fantasy football team that he called his mate, the Liverpool co-owner George Gillett, to enquire whether Steven Gerrard was going to play that weekend.

The fantasy football phenomenon is easy enough to quantify. Explaining it is a more complex proposition. There are studies in the United States that suggest fantasy gamers experience a similar euphoria to problem gamblers, a product of the endorphins released by risk-taking. But this doesn’t really explain the stickiness of FPL, where entry is free, the risk is minimal and the only real sense of loss is the mild nausea you feel on seeing the team news and realising that Riyad Mahrez has been left on the bench again.

Another paper published by academics at the University of Indiana identifies three main motivations to fantasy sports: sensation-seeking, a need for cognition, and a locus of control. The need for cognition, a desire not only to seek and deploy knowledge but to have it validated and demonstrated, also lies behind the evergreen appeal of the pub quiz, as well the annoying bloke on Twitter who points out that it’s actually Athletic Club and not Athletic Bilbao. And it reveals itself in a multitude of forms: not just in the business of trading players and scoring points, but in the pun-inspired team names that often demand as much care as the selections themselves: ‘Slumdog Mignolet’, ‘Pretentious, Mooy?’, ‘Gangsta’s Allardyce’.

This need is often deeply gendered: fantasy participation skews strongly male, and so do many of its auxiliary parts, from the fetishisation of arcane knowledge to the affected one-upmanship you often find in male friendship groups. Indeed, one academic study by Nickolas Davis and Margaret Carlisle Duncan at the University of Wisconsin posits that fantasy sports “reinforce hegemonic ideologies in sport spectatorship, emphasising authority, sports knowledge, competition, male-bonding, and traditional gender roles”, which is certainly a more valid objection than Anthony Martial being listed in the game as a midfielder rather than a striker.

But it’s the third of these ideas, the “locus of control”, that I find most interesting of all. Part of the eternal appeal of sport, I think, is based on a touching myth: that by walking through a turnstile or tuning in or simply paying attention, we are somehow participants in the spectacle, able to influence events through wish or whim alone. And yet this feels a less tenable position to take with every passing year, certainly in the case of elite football: its access increasingly unaffordable, its athleticism increasingly outlandish, its participants increasingly inaccessible.

Perhaps, then, the inexorable growth of fantasy football is tied up in a sort of disenfranchisement: a means of reasserting some form of emotional ownership in a sport that has come to see its public solely as potential consumers. You can’t oust your useless owner and you can’t get a ticket for the derby and you can’t throttle the Liverpool fan in accounts who insists on showing you his ‘6 TIMES’ tattoo every single time you walk past his desk, but you can at least make Aubameyang your triple captain, and remind yourself what it was like to care.

And it strikes me that, for all the sniffiness and the nerdery, fantasy football manages to recreate many of the things the real thing was supposed to provide. A sense of community. An opportunity to be a part of something larger. Something to talk about. Something to agonise over. A stake invented, to replace the one we lost.