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Brendan Rodgers' managerial career is fairly distinguished for someone not yet out of his thirties. Mine is not. During my immediate post-college years, singing up for fantasy leagues was fun because it seemed like a mindless way to pretend that I was still involved in sports, plus it had the word fantasy, so I signed up for every league available, ignorant of the fact that, as time passed, each of the previous seasons had seen me sign up and subsequently neglect my team after a matter of days. I gave up trying after a calendar year.
Then this past year I signed up for a fantasy baseball league with my dad, who's done a live, beer-drinking, player-organizing, coin-exchanging draft for years. Which, had I been in town, I would have happily joined and felt good about. Instead I told him I was in, then joined a league at work to keep myself on task with the one that actually mattered. Fail-safe. I crashed and burned on both after a few weeks. Sorry Dad.
But then the Euros arrived, and Noel had a fantastic idea of creating a fantasy league for the competition. Redemption. I took this very seriously, had Jonjo's Hairdresser near the top throughout much of group play and the first few knockout round matches. This being something I care deeply about, it was destined to be my first fantasy league success. After the quarterfinals I forgot about it and finished in 40th. Belated congrats to bannie22 and stuff.
And now the time has come for the start of the Premier League season, and I'm throwing myself into it for at least the next two days. We're going to stick with ESPN given the number of folks that signed up for the Euro league, but if it turns out that the Premier League version is better--and feedback welcome from those who have an actual attention span--we might migrate.
For now, though, go ahead and join up--the password is lfcoffside, and setting up an account is easy enough if you weren't around in the summer. You've got a few days to get everything squared away and then the rest of the year to forget about it. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
***Update***
Since more than a few people expressed a preference for the official Premier League version of fantasy football, we've gone ahead and created another league over there. Click the link to go to the league page home, select "private league", and enter 1306195-304235 to join up.
We'll run both this and the ESPN one throughout the year, and there's a 100% possibility that I'll forget about my participation in both by the time Saturday's match is done giving me an anxiety attack. Hopefully it'll be a fun thing for us all as the season progresses. Or it won't, but if nothing else the infighting can shift from incorrect opinions about player value to focusing on a false sense of superiority because you randomly picked a player who got points and stuff.
Just like it was intended.