Wasting Your Wildcard

Every Saturday afternoon, 5.8 million people around the world settle down to see how their team will get on. But this isn’t the team they support. It’s THEIR team. They have spent hour after hour assessing injuries, swapping subs, and tweaking formations. Because when the day is done and the scores are in, they want to be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘THAT TRIPLE CAPTAIN CALL WAS AN ACT OF GENIUS!’ Welcome to the obsessive world of Fantasy Football, where managers will do anything to succeed. David Wardale—writer for the UK's number one Fantasy Football site, Fantasy Football Scout—meets previous winners to discover how they beat millions to the crown. He reveals the leagues where failure involves outright humiliation and discovers just how low some managers will go to claim a psychological advantage. Along the way, he finds Saudi sheikhs, stats professors, most of Norway, and a member of one of the biggest pop bands of all time, all of them united by their unflinching desire for Fantasy Football greatness.

David Wardale is a freelance journalist and author with nearly 30 years' experience writing news and sport in print and online. He has written for a number of national and regional daily newspapers and was shortlisted for the 2001 UK Press Gazette's Online Reporter of the Year Award. For the past three years he has been a regular contributor to the Fantasy Football Scout website, covering the main Fantasy Premier League game, as well as writing articles on the Sun's Dream Team competition, the official UEFA Euro 2016 game, DraftKings, and ESPN's own Fantasy offering