Inside Fantasy Football, the Game Ruining My Life One Week at a Time

That is a good question. To tap into that we need to establish what Fantasy Football is (a way of flexing football superiority over your friends) and what it isn't (cool in any way), and establish some meaning in the middle ground. It starts here: some time a few seasons back, in terms of supporting football passion slowly ceded to cold statistical knowledge. In olden days, being a football fan was about wearing an £800 coat on the terraces and going to Tranmere away and lighting a flare, and having weepy late-night conversations with your wife about how much you'd managed to spend on pies, beer and shouting in one calendar year.

Now, being a football fan has changed, somewhat, morphed: we gauge players' worth not in terms of how they make us feel, or how often they get us up out of our seats, but by how many key passes they make, what their ExG is, how many assists they could get if only the team had a decent striker up top. Somewhere along the way football forgot how to beat its closed fist ritualistically against its heart and instead turned into Game of Thrones longreads without the dragons. And in that space Fantasy Football can thrive: an empirical way of showing your mates you know more about football than them, points logically assigned for goals and assists and Man of the Match performances; strict league tables, banterous team names.

Here is a world that has four-and-a-half million players every season (at the start, at least; by the end of the game it's tailed off to a still-impressive two million). Here is this great whirring world of gears and cogs that you, Chris, may not even know about. But it's ticking away, here, and in the lives of many men around you. It's ticking away here in this Stockley Park television studio. And we are here, my friend. We are here to ask whether I should captain Harry Kane for the last day of the season or not.

It is also an all-encompassing hell for anyone who takes it in any way seriously, which I am devastated to announce that I do.

The game itself is very simple: points are assigned for goals, assists and clean sheets; points are deducted for yellow cards, red cards, conceding four goals or more and missing a penalty. Your nominated captain each week will score double points, and you get one free transfer each week to help deal with line-up changes (as well as two do-what-you-want wildcards each year, where you can make as many transfers as you like without penalty). Time on the pitch contributes towards an overall points score: if a player from your first-pick 11 doesn't play, the four players on your bench, in order, are substituted in their place by an algorithmic mechanic after all of the final scores have been announced (this is why points scores always take an hour or so after a game to settle, for league tallies to be recalculated: it is the fault of your third striker, Victor Anichebe). Then there are bonus points, which game-runner Mark "not that one" Hughes is explaining to me from his base at ISM, Bristol.

"It's all based on Opta stats," he says, "but it's extra Opta stats that aren't used in the game – well, obviously, goals and assists are still used, but there's things like tackles and interceptions… there's a whole myriad of stats. Bonus points are basically just a calculation made on these extra Opta stats, and then the three highest scorers in the game will just get three, two, one. There's no human intervention; it's just completely based on the stats."

That is the game proper. The game above the game is played in WhatsApp groups and Facebook chats and uneasy text message relationships you have with half-friends from school, where you all banter each other off for scoring slightly fewer points in any given game week.

I should explain: Fantasy Football players thrive on differentials, those outside-of-the-top-four players who consistently score points despite costing less than more traditional form players, playing in less glamorous teams (with a strict £100 million budget to play with, you have to rely on some £4 million defenders to go alongside your David Luiz-types in defence: Nathan Ake at Bournemouth was the golden boy up, until Chelsea revoked his loan and he stopped getting minutes on the pitch), or benefit from a move in position that sees them defy their fantasy-set placement on the pitch to grab more goals in real life (Etienne Capoue thrived from an early season move up the pitch; West Brom's Chris Brunt was listed as a defender but played more in midfield; his teammate, The Ancient Remains of Gareth McAuley, scored six Premier League goals this year while keeping a fistful of clean sheets).

These are important not just for budgetary reasons, but because they truly offer you the edge: everyone has an in-form Eden Hazard in their team, for instance, so to stand above the crowd you need to scoop pockets of points up from other areas of the game. Josh King was the perfect differential player – a cheap, semi-anonymous midfielder at Bournemouth who, through injuries to the club's main strikers, was pushed up front, where he went on to score 16 goals for the season. Knowing who is going to strike form, and from which right-at-the-end-of-Match-of-the-Day teams, is the secret to fantasy football success.

So this year I went from Fickle Boy to Professor. This was a slow transition caused by years of Fantasy Football humiliation: despite Fantasy Football being a realm of uncool, come season's end some people will use their relative position in the league table above you as some sort of banter flex, and I was sick of my friend Adam beating me year after year and texting me "Ha!" or "Ha ha!" This meant adopting a new lifestyle: I followed an account called "The FPL General" on Twitter, I spent Friday lunchtimes looking at r/fantasyPL, I analysed fixtures and tracked them against possible form, I woke up early on Saturday mornings and sorted my line-up out with an app on my phone. Where previously Fantasy Football was a fun sub-game that enhanced my enjoyment of football games I was already watching – "Ah, Alexis Sanchez scored! More points for me!" – it now became a cruel whip with which to hamper my enjoyment of the weekend. The French have a word for it: l'esprit de Troy Deeney, that feeling when a player you agonised over inserting into your squad – but ultimately at the last minute didn't – scores a goal and gets nine points for the game week.

"Normally, most weeks what I would do is, I'd keep abreast of some information throughout the week, and then if the normal deadline falls, say, Saturday morning, I would normally, like, Friday night, I will do research." This is the tactic of Uwais Ahmed, who, going into the final game week, lies first in the overall Fantasy Football table, jostling for position against second-place Ben Crabtree. Uwais managed to leap from third to first in the table through an inspired decision to captain Harry Kane in GW37 (his four-goal, 48-point haul gave Uwais a total points score of 187), and now he's calm and quietly confident and weighing up his transfers an hour before the final kickoff with his assistant manager, his brother. "This year I wouldn't say that I took it more seriously," he says, of the pressure of being first, "but you obviously appreciate that this is obviously on another scale altogether. I don't go purely off instinct: get as much information as you need, as you can."

One of Uwais' most inspired decisions this year was to get on the Josh King bandwagon before it really started rolling. "I think he might have played three, maybe four games, and he hadn't done anything before that but he looked OK," he says. "He was up against West Ham and I wasn't overly impressed with their set-up, so I gave him the transfer and boom: and he scored a hat-trick and had another three on target and had another three shots off target – the statistics were brilliant. It's one of those decisions that you make ahead of the curve: most people wait to see if it will catch a little bit before maybe jumping on, and it's just about getting ahead of the curve."

And there – right there – lies the one and only thrill of the game.

The bandwagon ahead of today's game is with Philippe Coutinho: Liverpool are pushing for fourth and just need to win against a doomed Middlesbrough to qualify for the Champions League. This season, Liverpool have mainly relied on an attacking triumvirate for goals, and most fantasy managers in need of points are plumping for the 24-year-old Brazilian: he's really, really good, scored two and assisted one in his last game, and is playing in a team who need a convincing win, making him primed to be a high scorer this week. He's the most transferred-in player across the league as a result, but I don't have space for him.

"Yeah, you want to sort your defence out," Mark Southern is saying. He's the FPL's resident fantasy scout, a man who turned a blog network about Fantasy Football into a full-time gig at Premier League HQ, and the go-to man for fantasy advice (he's been making videos on the Facebook official page all morning, where he basically just tells everyone to transfer Hazard out and Coutinho in). He's jabbing at my phone screen with the tip of his knowledgeable finger. "Get Maguire out, he's injured… how much money have you got? Hmm. Get Matip in from Liverpool, he'll likely get a clean sheet and he could nick a goal if there's a set piece." He deliberates over my midfield and forward line. "Get Yoshida in from Southampton, play 4–4–2, captain Kane." He hands my phone back. Honest to god, by the end of this gameweek, this 20 seconds of advice has earned me 42 additional points.

Obviously, though, it's the last day of the season where we are, so he cannot offer pertinent advice to you. Mark's game plan for anyone looking to regroup ahead of next year's season is to start early: watch the pre-season games, note the form of players and the attacking shapes teams will be playing in the league, choose your defenders and midfielders appropriately. Already on the Fantasy Football website is a guide to making picks for next season, as well as an 80-odd day countdown to the kick off in August.

"What I always do, I look at the fixtures straight away and try and look mainly at the first three or four weeks – don't look beyond that," Mark says. "I think you've got to presume you've got the wildcard, and most players play the wildcard very early. The first mistake you can make with your first initial selection is planning too far ahead – don't do that. Play for the first two or three weeks and presume that you're going to play the wildcard."

He also thinks Chelsea's championship-winning 3–5–2 will filter down to other teams in the league, making attacking defenders and wing-minded midfielders especially valuable in next year's game. "We've seen wing-backs be a massive factor this season," he says, motioning high-points scorer Marcus Alonso on-screen. "Second half of the season, everyone's taken the Chelsea template and copied it. I think that will carry on into next year. I think a lot of teams have set up with three at the back, so I think it'll mean that you'll be able to find some fullbacks in some of the cheaper teams who are going to play further forward. Look at the pre-season friendlies and how teams are setting up, and see if you can spot, in particular, fullbacks that are playing wing-back. Marcus Alonso will be a conundrum, because he's going to be expensive – but there'll still be some bargain defenders to find."

That's basically the entire game of Fantasy Football. Finding a points-scoring left back at a mid-table team.

We're eating lunch when the news strikes: minutes before the 2PM game week deadline, Josh King – our Norwegian points hero, the affordable midfielder of dreams – announces via Instagram that he is injured and out of today's game. A scramble of activity: Mark helms the fantasy desk from the same social media nervebase that does the entire Premier League's social media output – which involves simultaneously watching nine games and occasionally yelling when someone scores, then rapidly aggregating the goal-assist info with Opta and tweeting it to anyone who can't for whatever reason watch the game, a process that seems to take at most 20 seconds per go, it's seriously very impressive and overwhelming to watch – and starts looking at which teams at the top might be affected: both have King, but Uwais in first has a midfield newly-strengthened with two Liverpool picks, while Ben in second only has King's Bournemouth teammate Junior Stanislas on the bench.

Both myself and the PR, Stefan, who has decided to throw away his lead at the top of the Premier League office league by taking a -4 hit to bring in Olivier Giroud, briefly panic then renege: we leave King in the team and let the automatic substitution mechanic fill in points for us. The FPL General, predicting mass panic, tweets this:

(You see how there is an entire world of emotion bubbling just out of sight of normal society, and it is almost exclusively populated by men, and all those men are really, really worried about Sergio Aguero's hamstrings? Do you see yet what playing this game is like? It isn't a game at all. It's a horrible lifestyle from which you cannot escape.)

Watching ten simultaneous games of football is quite a harrowing experience, more so when your fantasy team is riding on it: one thing Fantasy Football does is strips you a little of your allegiances, makes you do tiny fistbumps when opposition players make an assist, keep a clean sheet. Some players still hold onto grudges, though; there was a season when I refused to have The Vile Turncoat Robin van Persie in my team, even when he was the league's top points-scorer. I have, despite myself, been very reliant on two or three Tottenham players this year. Ben Crabtree (2nd place, GW37) has never, ever had a Liverpool player in his squad, meaning he's swerving clear of the Philippe Coutinho bandwagon as we come up to the final game of the season. I'm impressed he's managed to climb to near the top without once recruiting Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino, a cheap flush of Divock Origi.

"I would never have a Liverpool player," he says. "If you look at my overall rankings from previous years, the one that kind of pops-up as a really low finish was the Suárez season [when the Uruguayan won the European Golden Boot after scoring 31 goals]. I never had Suárez the whole time, and obviously it got punished. But I still kind of keep to my own values. We've sort of got a name for the idea of not having a Liverpool player – the 'no-shite policy' is what it's officially called amongst us. You've got to kind of stick with your morals."

And as morals go, Ben's serve him well: in the post-final whistle confusion, as Mark and a colleague go about comparing Ben (2nd) and Uwais' (1st) teams, it's hard exactly to tell who has won. At first, it seems that Uwais might have taken it with the last kick of the last game of the season: the Chelsea match, running over-time because England's Brave John Terry insisted on being clapped off the pitch in the 26th minute, ends as the champions score a fifth against Sunderland, with substitute Cesc Fabregas providing the assist – his second of the game, pushing his points total to eight with Uwais nosing in front.

But then the slow realisation: Ben's automatic Josh King substitution is Junior Stanislas, a Bournemouth teammate only playing today because of King's injury, who scored a goal in his absence. With his tally of nine – and Uwais losing points for bringing in two Liverpool midfielders, Lallana and Coutinho, up on the final day – Ben edges it by five points. Josh King's ankle twinge and deep-set anti-Liverpool morals have won him the trophy. Thirty-eight straight weeks of overthinking every single football game still comes down to luck, hatred and a little bit of magic.

@joelgolby