The Great Fantasy Football Cull: Envisioning The Death Of The Fantasy Premier League

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

We have a confession to make, fellow football fans. Of the 46 teams in our work Fantasy Football league, the staff of this particular sports outlet come in at an average position of 39th. We write about football for a living, for fuck's sake, and we can't even get our amusingly monikered Fantasy teams into the top ten of our godforsaken work league. We spent hours and days selecting players, tweaking formations and crafting the perfect pun for a team name back at the beginning of the season, and now the guy who clearly couldn't really be arsed and so Googled 'Funny Fantasy Football names' and went with 'Lallanas In Pyjamas' is 25 points off the top of the league. It's a fucking travesty, and leaves us feeling deeply ashamed.

With our self-esteem being dragged through the dirt on a weekly basis, any thought of Fantasy Football being 'fun' or 'sociable' or 'enjoyable' has gone out of the window. When Jermain Defoe goes another week without scoring and we see that little red arrow signifying a further drop in our league standing, we scream aloud, tear at our hair and soak our cheeks in tears of remorse. Why do we do this to ourselves? What is the actual point of Fantasy Football anymore? What used to be a bit of fun between a small group of friends has become a tool by which everyone in the workplace must precisely quantify their prescient knowledge of the football, hence assigning each individual an exact ranking in terms of their social, moral and spiritual worth. We have quantified our own knowledge, fellow football fans, and it falls horribly short. We have been given our ranking in the workplace hierarchy, and it is embarrassingly, humiliatingly, contemptibly low.

If there is any comfort to be found in this situation, it is that there are numerous others who share our burden. In our inadequacy and emasculation, we are not alone, with hundreds of thousands of other Fantasy Football players still below us in the national rankings. To all those who selected Olivier Giroud up front, only to substitute him out for the Sunderland game in which he scored two goals within only a few minutes, we say: there are many others like you. To all those who paid a huge fee for Paul Pogba in the midfield, only to see a return of two goals over the course of the last three and a half months, we say: there are many of us who made that mistake, and we should help each other to get over the pain.

In fact, with so many of us disillusioned by our Fantasy teams at this point, perhaps it's time to launch a popular revolution. Why should we put up with the oppression of Fantasy Football, when it brings us only misery, self-loathing and shame? It's come to that time of the season when, having tasted the bitter regret of wasting our triple captain on Jamie Vardy, the vast majority of us ought to admit the truth, namely that we are total shite at Fantasy Football. Our points totals are pathetic, our team selections are ridiculous and topping our work leagues is way beyond us. Only when we reconcile ourselves to that reality can we log off, delete the app, and voluntarily cull ourselves from an activity which our superior workmates cajoled us into, but which we probably didn't even want to do in the first place.