The final FFScout team standings after inaugural Fantasy League season

Last Sunday, when the final whistles went across the land and people were frantically hitting refresh on their FPL mini-leagues, the curtain also came down on the first season of the Scout’s venture into the wonderful world of Fantasy League.

As a quick recap, as this has felt like several seasons rolled into one: last summer, seven of the Scout’s finest – editor David, deputy editor Neale (aka Skonto Rigga), head honcho Chris (aka El Fozzie), site manager Geoff, assistant community manager Ted (aka Rotation’s Alter Ego), IT whizz Mat (aka Matzila) and community writer Will (aka TopMarx), plus yours truly – got together in a London hostelry and held the inaugural FFS Fantasy League auction.

Fantasy League (FL) is the original and, dare I say it, the greatest form of Fantasy Football that exists as it is the ultimate way of battling against your mates without everyone having the same players due to each manager having a unique squad of players. Furthermore, those unique squads are established, social-distancing permitting, during the best part of the season which is the initial auction and which is best held, where possible, in licensed premises!

READ MORE: Strategies for success at a Fantasy League auction
READ MORE: How to prepare for a Fantasy League auction

As a further recap, at the halfway mark of the season (well, Gameweek 21 if we’re being picky), the table looked like this:

Then this pesky virus came along and disrupted everything. Prior to lockdown, David was still comfortably in the lead but I had hit a bit of form and was closing the gap.

This had been helped in no small part by my picking up Bruno Fernandes while everyone else was snoozing, and we all know how well he hit the ground running. Without boring you with the details, once Project Restart had kickstarted the season, I was able to overhaul the gap to David and then increased my own lead at the top of the table, week by week, until the season finished thusly:

It’s a little bit awkward having to write about being the winner as I certainly don’t want to have the appearance of gloating, and it’s also uncomfortable as, prior to this season, I was the only one with FL experience.

As I’ve written about previously, an auction can be daunting for the uninitiated and prior experience can be priceless. It’s worth then looking at the achievements of the seven rookies.

David smashed the rest of the competition with a massive margin of 59 points over third place. In the world of FL, 59 equates to 19 goals and an assist.

There was also fierce competition for third place (a European spot, no less) which was anyone’s for the taking going into the final weekend.

Chris appeared to be best-placed to grab it but a fearsome display from Neale’s Manchester City midfield duo of Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling was sufficient to see him jump from sixth to third. Chris beat Mat to fourth place only courtesy of a higher number of goals scored.

However, the fact that only 15 points separated third from seventh is testament to how close it all was and how well everyone did at the auction.

Speaking of the auction, just quickly turning our attention to Captain Hindsight and his 20:20 vision, the following team could have been acquired last July, based on prices paid at the time:

A very cool 823 points for the manager who picked up this squad and it would have been enough to place them top of the global rankings by a very considerable margin.

Furthermore, had that manager dropped Abraham to pick up Bruno Fernandes when he arrived in the January window, they would have added 34 points (net) to take it up to 857.

The latter four players in the list would have been, nominally, substitutes, but with FL’s ability to make team changes between games, it is highly likely that all 15 players could have been played every single Gameweek barring the last one, during which Vardy, Abraham, Barnes and Antonio could have been benched for their respective blanks.

Even with a pure ‘set and forget’ from day 1, making no substitutions at all, the starting XI would have amassed a total of 648 points; sufficient to have won our league by a country mile.

Looking back at the Gameweek 21 vs Gameweek 38 tables really underscores the beauty of FL as it’s amazing how fortunes can change. In FPL, you can protect a lead to an extent by matching your opponents’ players as much as possible and, apart from the occasional meteoric rise such as that demonstrated by Az towards the end of last season, it can be very difficult to overcome a large points gap.

In FL, due to the unique make-up of each manager’s squad, it is possible to make up rapid ground on other managers and so there is almost always something to play for. You never know when your players will hit a fine vein of form while your opponents’ players see their points dry up.

As of Gameweek 21, I was 67 points adrift of David so needed my players effectively to score 22 more goals/clean sheets (each of which is worth 3 points in FL) than David’s just to bring myself to within a point of him. That may not seem like a great deal with 17 Gameweeks remaining but Fantasy Football, like real life, ebbs and flows, and it’s rare that you’ll get bumper scores week after week while your opponents stall.

In the end, however, I outscored David by 117 points over those 17 sets of fixtures, equivalent to 39 additional goals. It’s a horrible cliché but I’ll use it anyway: this game really is a marathon and not a sprint, and it’s very rare that someone will lead from lights out to chequered flag, if you’ll excuse my mixing my metaphors.

There may be some of you reading this who already play FPL and feel you wouldn’t want to play multiple forms of Fantasy Football, particularly given that there’s very little likelihood of your having the same players in each team. I’ll confess that I’d not been crazy about the idea previously, hence my never having taken FPL seriously prior to this season as my brain couldn’t cope with the fact that a player scoring in FPL frequently meant that one of my FL competitors was benefiting.

However, I’ve learned this season that they’re not mutually exclusive and you can be successful with multiple teams in different formats. Modesty almost prevents me from saying this (almost….), but this season I had two FL teams (one with the Scout guys and the other with folks I’ve played with for over 20 years), plus my FPL team, and I was able to win both FL leagues, finishing in 10th place globally with one team, and finish inside the top 6k of FPL, all with vastly different teams.

As you’ll doubtless all appreciate, winning at any form of Fantasy Football isn’t about having the best players (although I’ll concede that that helps) but rather the best squad of players, and that can come in many guises and iterations. You can approach each team and each form of the game with equal levels of seriousness, passion and commitment without it being to the detriment of the other.

While I’m here, I’d also like to address the elephant in the room for anyone who has played FL this past season. I don’t have any affiliation to FL apart from a very strong desire that they continue to provide, for decades to come, the game that I’ve loved for over half my lifetime.

By their own admission, they had a shocker last summer when they were let down by a third-party development team and had to launch with an incomplete website. Because of the move to different variants of the game (customisable scoring systems and the introduction of defensive midfielders), they didn’t have the option of reverting to the former platform. I’ve read many cries of anguish from long-standing players and I feel your pain as I suffered similar frustration this season. I would ask this though: please bear with them and give them a chance to serve up a better experience next season.

FL is, ultimately, a small business which relies principally on a single source of income each summer; if they were to refund everyone’s subs or give away the game entirely for free, I imagine they’d quickly go out of business. So please be careful what you wish for.

If, like me, you want to continue playing FL in the future, give them your support, forgive this season’s mistakes, and let them have the chance to provide you, once again, with the greatest form of Fantasy Football on the planet.

Until then, enjoy the rest of the summer and I’ll be back in the early autumn to report on next season’s Scout FL league, hopefully with some new faces to swell the pot and freshen things up.