Blog #4 Cash leagues

Now as much as I enjoy football, and playing fantasy, the main reason I put so much time into it is mainly to try and win ‘cash leagues’ and to see some rewards for my efforts.

From an early age I had an interest in gambling, and in particular numbers and stats. Gambling was a big part of my family growing up, in particular horse racing as opposed to football betting. My favourite yearly sporting event to watch is probably still the ‘grand national’.

Even at school I would make bets with friends, on things like football matches, games of pool, poker games or even big brother evictions 🙂 I understand the dangers of gambling, and have always kept within my means, and am relatively sensible on bets. Even when I started my first ‘sun dream team’ mini league in 2007 as a casual player there was a small entrance fee attached £5 per player.

As I detailed in a previous blog, while I understood there were big prizes available on fantasy football. I thought people were just getting lucky, as opposed to much skill/time and effort being involved and due to the entrance fees and cost of making transfers (premium phone calls) I also thought there was an element of a ‘con’ being involved by the organisers.

My biggest regret in ‘fantasy’ is not becoming a serious player sooner (I started in 2016 after playing for 9 years as a casual) why this is a regret is largely due to the much bigger prize money that seemed to be available years ago. Whilst I’m not suggesting these games would have been any easier to win or challenge in, there certainly seemed a lot more available of them (daily mirror/star/record etc) and they also used to have alot more prizes available (top 50/ manager of the week/ month etc) now it seems all the top fantasy managers in the country are competing for a couple of prizes.

Every year I see ‘dream team’ drop its prize money and place payouts (the euro game pays out 1 person) and whilst fanteam does offer big prizes looking at their seasonal league most of the big winners are massive multi entrants, also this brings the top players in the world to the table. For me my preference would be to make them ‘gambling games’ and charge everyone a small entrance fee to play (£2 per team) to create some extra prize money, unfortunately I cannot see this happening anytime soon. It certainly seems the future of ‘fantasy’ in the U.K. in terms of big prizes is fanteam.

In terms of prize winnings, I am no expert by any means, many well known players in the ‘community’ have won life changing amounts.I am however coming off the back of my most successful season yet with £7,700 of winnings, this was off around £250-300 of entrance fees. Just over 5k came from dream team, 2k FPL and the rest fanteam and sky. I should also point out I imagine these seasonal ranks I achieved (12th in dream team and 1,600th in FPL) will be my PB’s for many years to come if not forever? So I certainly am not expecting a seasonal win like this again. In terms of career wins I have won £12k off probably an investment of just under 1k. I would estimate 9-9.5k has come from the ‘sun dream team’ format. The majority of this has been won in national leagues (online groups etc) only £1,400 has come from my local league. The only problem with these national leagues is they are extremely hard to win, and you find yourself completing against the top players in the national leaderboard too.

In terms of risks involved, of course sending money to people you don’t know comes with risk, I usually stick to £10/£20 entrance games, although I even know of a £200 a head game (far too rich for me) I have never personally been affected by someone taking the funds although I have heard of this happening, so I think always try and do abit of research of the group/ individual, and only enter what you can afford, whilst setting yourself a budget to start with, and don’t spend winnings until it’s in your account (I’m currently waiting on £275 from an fpl league still) Sky offer a great feature where they hold the funds (the sun did this a few years ago) and this would be my preference.

There is a great mix of cash leagues out there to suit all budgets, many are ‘novelty’ leagues too, which add a bit of fun even if your team as a whole isn’t doing too well (monthly league/ weekly eliminations etc)

Again thanks for reading and please share any cash league stories or your successes in them, and good luck to anyone entering any euro cash leagues.