As some of you may have noticed the new English football season is upon us. The BBC is running its “fantasy football game”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/fantasy_football/default.stm for the last time this season, and I’ll be entering as I usually do. There’s a facility to run a “mini-league”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/info/friends.asp consisting of friends, relations, enemies, critics, critical critics etc. So if any contributor, regular commenter or reader wants to join our league — the “Crooked Timberites”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/friends/friends.asp?pin=700279 — they are very welcome to do so. You have to “register”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/signup/signup.asp with the BBC and choose your team first, and then email your PIN to me, the Chairman of the League, at crookedfootball-at-yahoo.co.uk . Those who know nothing whatsoever about football can always use the “lucky dip” facility to have the BBC computer pick a team for them. Try to register before 1230 BST on Saturday, 28 August 2004
{ 10 comments }
Des von Bladet is very allez les bleus 08.16.04 at 6:39 pm
Bah! It is focussed on the inconsequential bourgeois nationaliste farce of the domestique league (“Premiership”, indeed!) when as any schoolchildren kno the Champions League – the League of Champions – is the competition wherein lies foopball’s destiny! The unfolding of the dialectique is inexorable; the World Spirit’s will inevitable!
Meanwhile, your ridiculous Engleesh league will of course be won – at a canter! – by the mighty Челсий.
Гто кого, silly Engleeshes, Гто кого!
John Quiggin 08.16.04 at 11:12 pm
Showing my faith in the efficient markets hypothesis, I have signed up for the lucky dip allocation.
dsquared 08.17.04 at 12:01 am
I’m going to wait until everyone else has picked a team then choose the most popular selections in order to benefit from the “Wisdom of Crowds” :-)
James Surowiecki 08.17.04 at 12:21 am
Actually, I’ve played the Yahoo.uk version of this game for years now, and I’ve always wanted to see how a team of the most popular players would do, but I haven’t been able to figure out any way to get all the information you’d need. Even if you could, it’d be imperfect — in many cases, the most popular players would still only be selected by a minority of the teams — but Yahoo used to list every week the top 20 or so most popular players, and at an eyeball glance they seemed to make up a pretty good squad. The other factor distorting this is that lots of people, especially early in the season, clearly pick players they’re fond of (Man U players were always overrepresented), rather than players who will actually help them win.
dsquared 08.17.04 at 12:33 am
I did have a system for Fantasy Football leagues which was based on trying to pick players who would play in every game of the season; the theory was that people tend to overpick glamorous show-ponies who get injured early on. But I moved jobs and thus out of our office pool before the season was over.
btw, James, email me; there’s a free book in it for you.
James Surowiecki 08.17.04 at 2:28 am
Will do, Daniel.
The buy-solid-starters strategy wouldn’t have the same effect in the Yahoo league, where you can turn over your team every week. But it’s definitely the case that it takes a while for people to recognize the virtues of good players on weak teams.
Another Damned Medievalist 08.17.04 at 8:03 pm
I usually play the soccernet version, but it’ll be much more fun playing with the Timberites. I think one of the worst parts of the big teams playing squad rotation is that it makes choosing a fantasy team really hard — ordinarily, someone like Duff would be a shoe-in, but not now …
Chris Bertram 08.17.04 at 8:11 pm
The BBC site seems to be playing up at the moment. So if I haven’t added you, or you can’t get in, that’s why.
Another Damned Medievalist 08.17.04 at 9:23 pm
Nope — still picking. It seems that the price list is somewhat out of order, in that they don’t provide a budget that allows one to pick Henry and anybody else of note. Not to mention that Malbranque costs more than Vieira???
Another Damned Medievalist 08.17.04 at 9:40 pm
D’oh! Signed up with my own name. Would fellow players be so kind as to keep me relatively anonymous? Cheers!
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