How Fantasy Soccer Works

Real clubs — entire teams like Arsenal, Real Madrid or Napoli. You don't draft strikers and goalkeepers; you own the whole club, and it earns fantasy points from how the real team actually performs on the pitch.

No. If you can read a league table, you can play. Points come from things anyone can follow — a club won, scored, kept a clean sheet — and the app does all the tracking and math for you. Newcomers and die-hards end up on a level field faster than you'd think.

By default, Europe's "Big Five": the Premier League (England), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany) and Ligue 1 (France). Your commissioner can widen the pool with more European leagues — the Eredivisie (Netherlands), Belgium's Pro League, the Scottish Premiership, Turkey's Süper Lig and others — so your group has more clubs to choose from.

A live snake draft: everyone picks in turn, and the order reverses each round so it stays fair (last pick in round one gets first pick in round two). You've got about 90 seconds per pick, and you draft one club each round until every roster is full.

Balance beats hype. A roster of six title-chasers who all play each other cancels itself out on the weeks they clash — someone has to lose. Mix proven point-scorers with clubs that have kind early fixtures, and don't forget only 5 of your clubs start each week, so depth matters as much as star power.

Line up a few backup targets before your pick comes around — the club you wanted often goes a spot or two early.

Queue up the clubs you want in advance. If your timer expires, the app auto-picks the top club from your queue — or, if your queue's empty, the best club still available. You'll never miss a pick.

8 by default — but your commissioner can set the roster anywhere from 4 to 12 clubs.

The default is 8 clubs: 5 starters and 3 on the bench. Every matchweek you choose which 5 clubs start. Only your starters score — bench clubs sit that week.

Each club locks at its own kickoff. So you can keep tweaking your lineup right up until a club's real match starts — clubs that have already kicked off are locked in, the rest are still free to move.

When your clubs play across different days, you can watch the early games and still swap a starter whose match hasn't begun. Kickoff-by-kickoff locking is a real edge if you pay attention.

It scores 0 for the week — think of it as a bye. When you're picking your 5 starters, check that they actually have a fixture, so you're not starting an idle club and leaving points on your bench.

Distance and difficulty. A tap-in from inside the box counts; a strike from outside counts more; a screamer from your own half is worth the most. It rewards the clubs that actually create big moments — not just the ones that get lucky from the spot.

They add up. Saves, shots on target and accurate passes are tiny on their own, but across a full 90 minutes a busy goalkeeper or a possession-heavy side quietly banks a real cushion — sometimes enough to swing a close round even without a goal.

Not in your regular season — that's scored from domestic league matches only. A midweek European run doesn't add to your matchweek total. European football is the Continental Cup's territory, a separate game with its own draft and its own roster.

Scoring is competition-blind: a win is a win, whoever it came against. Beat a bottom-half side and you earn exactly what you'd earn for beating Liverpool.

That quietly favours clubs in weaker leagues, and we can put a number on it. Across the 2025/26 season, scored with the default values above, PSV Eindhoven banked 806.2 points from 34 Eredivisie matches — 4th of 132 clubs. Manchester City managed 773.3 from 38 Premier League matches, and finished 8th. PSV outscored City by 33 points while playing four fewer games, and Sporting CP finished ahead of City too.

Nobody thinks PSV had a better season than City. They had an easier league.

League Strength is the fix: an optional multiplier that scales a competition's points down, so a point earned in a tougher league is worth more than a point earned in an easier one. At the Standard tier PSV's 806.2 becomes 685.3, and City finishes in front where you'd expect.

It's a scaling of the whole match, not a rewrite of the rules — a Standard-tier club still scores the same way, it just keeps 85% of the total.

Three tiers, and only three — your commissioner picks one per competition, never a freehand number.
Elite ×1.00 — Europe's Big Five, at full value.
Standard ×0.85 — every other league, and where they all start.
Minor ×0.75 — a steeper cut, applied by hand only.

A club that banks 14 points in a match keeps all 14.0 at Elite, 11.9 at Standard, or 10.5 at Minor.

Never — and that's deliberate, not an oversight. In the Cup, clubs from every league play *each other*: Celtic away at Bayern is the hard fixture. Discounting Celtic there would punish them twice for a difficulty the competition has already accounted for. The weighting applies to domestic league matches and nothing else.

It ships off. Nothing is weighted unless your commissioner deliberately switches it on — and the moment they do, the Big Five sit at Elite and every other league at Standard, so a default Big-Five league's scores don't move at all.

And it can't be sprung on you: League Strength locks the moment your draft starts. Whatever it says when you're picking clubs is what it says all season.

Check your league's Rules page before the draft — if strength is on, a dominant Eredivisie side is worth a little less than its raw points suggest, and that belongs in your draft board.

If your commissioner turns on waivers, yes — you drop a club and claim an available one. There are two common styles: FAB (a blind-bid budget, where the highest bid wins a club) or a traditional priority order. Heads-up: claims are processed in a nightly run, not the instant you submit them.

Yes — propose a club-for-club (or multi-club) swap to another manager. By default trades need commissioner approval before they go through.

The season runs in weekly matchweeks. Two matchweeks make one head-to-head round against another manager — whoever's starters score more wins the round. Win rounds to climb the standings.

You're ranked by your record, with tiebreakers — total points scored, head-to-head results, and more — in an order your commissioner sets. Same idea as any league table.

The top teams make a bracket at the end of the season (6 teams by default). Some leagues run an "extended" final that stretches over an extra matchweek for a bigger finish.