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Tuesday, December 09, 2008

A tale of two teams

I ran into a reader last week who wanted an update on the fantasy soccer front. As i told him, it's a lot easier to do this stuff when you're winning. Stephen Ireland's piss-poor game last weekend certainly didn't help me at all.

some of you may remember the fine details. I actually signed up for two different fantasy leagues, one sponsored by the Premier League itself, and one run by the Guardian newspaper. Within the Premier League's game, i'm in 4 different groupings, one for Bolton Wanderers fans, one for people from the US, a small, 18 person Durham league loosely affiliated with Bull McCabe's, and a "head-to-head" competition with 19 other random strangers. I started out pretty well in that league, staying on top of the Durham group for most of the first 9 weeks or so, and in the top 3-5% of the larger groupings. Then i lost a few players to injury, made a few bad trades, benched players who should have been starting and vice versa, and now i find myself pretty much in the middle of the pack: 428,000 out of 1.77 million in the big game (25% or thereabouts), 2670 out of about 10,000 Wanderers fans, 12,600 out of 55,000+ Americans. And despite having the 5th highest points total in my head-to-head league, a run of bad luck has me languishing in 18th place as i've lost a whole bunch of matchups by less than 5 points each.

But let's take a look at the Guardian.

There are about 88,000 players in this league. In addition to the overall competition, i'm in three other leagues. Again, one for Wanderers fans (about 525), one for US players (about 1000), and one for readers of the daily soccer humor column, The Fiver (about 1000).

I currently sit around 5800 overall, or about 7%. For the month of December, i'm at 2809, or top 3%, and for the past weekend, i'm in position 315, or about the top .4% (99.6 percentile, if you've just taken the LSAT.)

But wait, there's more. Among Wanderers fans, i'm at 54 for the season, and among US players i'm #101, both just around top 10%. But check this out:


That's right. A top ten finish for the week among Americans, and the number one slot among Wanderers fans. I'm in the running for the December prize of a thousand pounds with another good week, and i didn't come that far from winning the signed jersey for manager of the week.

Like i said, it's easier to write about this when you're doing well.

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