Born in 1988 from an idea by journalist Riccardo Albini, fantasy football is today one of Italians’ favorite pastimes. Let’s discover all the secrets between private leagues and championships with millionaire prize pools.
Fantasy football is more than a game
One of the first things that foreign players new to Italy notice is the appearance of comments and private messages on their social networks referencing fantasy football, a game they are unfamiliar with. It should be read in this sense as well. Statements regarding the intolerance of many football playersHe considers the requests of dozens of users every week on his Instagram accounts for him to constantly score goals and perform well as a source of stress.
The incredible world of Fantasy Football, which has great economic and commercial impacts and has now become a huge phenomenon in our country, was born in 1988, based on an idea by Riccardo Albini. Albini is the founder of Videogiochi, the first magazine dedicated to video games, founded in 1982. Inspired by Fantasy FootballA type of fantasy football game related to American football, played by monitoring the performance of football players based on statistics at the end of the match. Never Albini, as he declared several timesHe imagined that fifteen years later his strange idea would become a game with millions of fans.
Fantasy football: the most common passion among Italians
In fact, in Italy, they are predicted to play fantasy football well, according to fairly reliable estimates from most major sports newspapers. six million people, more than four million football players. A truly incredible figure, far exceeding the number of other informal or recreational activities available in our area.
For those few who still have no idea what it is, let’s explain what it is in a few words. The concept is really simple: Each player is given a grade based on their performance. Bonuses or penalties are added to this notelinked to goals, assists, yellow cards, sending offs, own goals, missed or saved penalties. The sum of the votes of the 11 players the fantasy football team puts on the field constitutes the score.
So how to create and line up a team? Here is where the most important dilemma of the fantasy football world occurs, a choice that also depends on the type of tournament Which one is played? Actually there are two options. The first involves creating your own fantasy football team, having a certain number of credits, selecting players from a list of “listones” where each player is assigned a value.
In this case, there is no privilege in purchasing the player and the same player can be in the squad of different teams. It could potentially even be the exact same teams. This solution is often used for: multi-player leaguesfor online tournaments with thousands of members, in short for fantasy football groups where it is concretely impossible to operate differently.
The second method is the one involving the legendary “auction”. In this case, each participant with a predetermined number of credits creates his own team by purchasing players through an auction in which all fantasy coaches of the relevant league participate. With this system, each team creates a unique rosterThat players are only used by the team that manages to recruit them.
This is a solution that is almost always used in tournaments between friends or when a maximum of 14-16 teams participate. As a rule, among fantasy football fansAuction is one of the most iconic momentsA pivotal crossover in fantasy football culture, with hour-long marathons, last-second scrambles for the most important players, grudges, strategies and the construction of a parallel geofootball universe.
Fantasy football variants: modifier, mantra, module change
As is inevitable, a game with more than twenty years of service should be subject to inspections from time to time. updating and reshaping operations. In this sense, fantasy football has been enriched with a large number of optional alternatives, some complementary, some of which can be integrated into the classical mechanism, imagined with the idea of making the game more dynamic and functional according to the changes that occur in football over time. itself.
One of the unconventional versions most used among enthusiasts is the so-called module change. In practice, in classic fantasy football, it is possible to replace a player, in the case of an unassigned vote, only with an equal role from among those listed on the bench. However, in case of a module change, if there is no other player with the same role on the bench, it can be made by adding a player change. Footballers listed in different positions Your area. If this happens, the system automatically redeploys the team based on a module that is updated upon replacement and change, hence the name of the team module also changes.
Mantra (players lined up in their original roles, such as full-back and defensive midfielder) and defensive switcher (a mechanism that assigns bonus points to the defensive unit if you line up with 4 or 5 men) other very popular systemsThere are many more variations that continue to develop the Italians’ true passion: fantasy football.
