Flying Without Ings: EFL prepares to enter fun world of fantasy league | Ben Fisher

Though the new English Football League season does not kick off for almost three weeks with a Friday-night Championship double-header, its fantasy league launches on Monday. Cue punny team names – One Size Fitz Hall, and Ctrl, Alt, De Laet spring to mind – lesser-spotted formations and shrewd, strategic managerial selections. For the first time, Championship, League One and League Two players will get their moment in the sun in a bottomless virtual world as Fantasy EFL embarks on a debut campaign ready to capture the hearts of supporters.

Adebayo Akinfenwa, an EFL icon who surely would have been a popular pick in his heyday, says the Birmingham City goalkeeper and former Wycombe teammate Ryan Allsop, the Leeds winger Crysencio Summerville and Wrexham striker Paul Mullin will be his first picks. “Every year I get put into a WhatsApp group to play in a fantasy league,” says Akinfenwa, revealing an unsurprising team name: Beast Mode. “I think my 14-year-old son and my nephew came first and second in our one last year. They’re methodical when it comes to stats.”

Fantasy Premier League is the daddy of the genre with more than 11 million players, having had 76,000 upon its advent in 2002-03, and now there is an official EFL opponent on the digital shelves. At the end of the season there could be another generation of fantasy-league cult heroes a la Michu, who arrived at Swansea City an unknown quantity in 2012-13, or Luka Milivojevic, a penalty king during his time at Crystal Palace. Ed Versen, the director of client strategy and implementation at Genius Sports, the producers of Fantasy EFL, remembers playing the Championship Manager 2001-02 series, in which then-free agent Cherno Samba became an overnight sensation.

Now it could be a goalscoring defender at Harrogate Town or prolific Port Vale forward. “It will happen organically,” Versen says. “Everyone is always saying if you play FPL, for example, that you start taking an interest in players and matches that, ordinarily, you wouldn’t have, and that is a key element. You could be a Blackburn fan and just follow Blackburn, but suddenly you’re taking an interest in what is going on in League Two. There are points for blocks, successful tackles, interceptions and key passes for midfielders and forwards, and maybe the guy who sits top of the tree at the end of the season is in League Two.”

Fifteen years ago, as Versen says, fantasy football was largely boxed off by newspapers. But FPL has evolved into a beast – endless tips, statistics and analysis shows orbit its world – and while for many it represents fun with family and friends, for others it is relatively serious business. “People play for different reasons but I think a key demographic of people who like these games play because they really want to dig into the stats,” says Versen. “Ultimately, we take raw data, plug it in and that comes out as points. If you like stats, you can invest time to research into which players are going to score more points for them. ‘Assist’ only really entered the fan lexicon because of these games, when towards the early 2000s people were talking about assists a lot more, because the assist was captured and it was something you could score points from.”

There is an obvious blueprint to follow, but there are differences between FPL and Fantasy EFL. After conducting surveys and talking to focus groups, the EFL did not wish to simply copy and paste. In a nod to its 72-club structure, managers will select seven players from almost 2,000 across its three divisions, plus two clubs to win every week, though users can only pick any one team on five occasions during the season. Teams will lineup in a 1-2-2-2, 1-2-3-1 or 1-3-2-1 shape. Scoring more than two goals, clean sheets and away wins will generate bonus points. “Fans follow their teams around the country and one of the best things is having that trip and winning away,” Versen says, “so we wanted to lean into that and ensure we built that into the mechanics.”

Diogo Jota famously told of his Football Manager love-story coaching Telford United and fellow Premier League players including James Maddison, Anthony Gordon, Aaron Ramsdale, Kieran Trippier and John McGinn are said to have competed in FPL last season. A string of EFL players can now also give into the temptation of picking themselves and teammates. “At the beginning of the season there was always one player – at Wycombe it was Joe Jacobson – that would say: ‘Listen, we’re going to do a league,’ either for bragging rights or a prize,” says Akinfenwa. “People would say: ‘I’ve picked this player, this guy is my captain, I got this many points last year.’ When you have that competitive element, whether it is playing games or fantasy, then there are always going to be people talking about it.”

The EFL’s chief executive, Trevor Birch, anticipates Fantasy EFL will stir interest “beyond fans who attend matches and those who watch along at home” and one of the most enjoyable parts of fantasy football usually occurs long before a ball has been kicked: landing on a team name. Over the years some have become fantasy-league staples, from Champagne Super Rovers and Bayer Neverlosing to Krul and the Gang.

“One that amused me was Flying Without Ings, a pun scuppered by the manager actually picking [Danny] Ings in his team,” says Versen. “If you look at the leaderboard after the first weekend you will see some of the creativity. Hopefully it’s going to be a good season.”