You’ve thought up a punny team name, agonised over squad selections and joined a league. You’re ready to spend countless hours meticulously planning transfers, agonising over which player should be your captain and frantically trying to check who got the assist for a goal.
This will be familiar to the more than 11 million playing the official fantasy football game of the Premier League. It is a modern, cultural movement that can feel almost as important to some as the real action on the pitch, as intrinsic to the matchday experience as pies, pints or programmes.
But what about in women’s football? Can this craze migrate across to the Women’s Super League? WSL attendances rose by 41% last season to a cumulative 971,977, but whether that engagement translates to off-pitch obsessions with clean sheets, bonus points and “double gameweeks” could be an intriguing measure of how successful the league is in the coming years.
One small group of young entrepreneurs based in London believe they are witnessing that fandom blossom first hand. In 2022, they built Fantasy WSL, with no official link to the WSL, and last term, in their first full season operating, 32,000 “managers” played and set up 4,232 mini-leagues.
As enthusiasm for their app appears to grow, independent accounts on social media platforms are posting videos with analysis, and blogs are offering advice on picks or critiquing valuations. There are many other similarities: it’s free and the rules give players a fictional £100m budget for 15 players. Sound familiar?
Scanning through the leaderboards, instead of Haaland, Salah or Saka being playfully weaved into team names, you find teams such as “Earps, I did it again”, “She Pelova” and “Reiten’s on the wall”. Last season’s winner named their side “gimme gimme gimme a Julie from Norway”, in reference to the former Manchester City wing-back Julie Blakstad. Off-season sign-ups have taken the number of users to nearly 40,000 before they launch their 2024-25 game on Saturday and they are targeting doubling that user-base for the new campaign.
“We wanted what we’ve experienced with FPL with the WSL – we couldn’t find anything, so we just made it ourselves,” says the co-founder and chief executive, Dani Gonçalves. She has played men’s fantasy football for a decade but started keenly following women’s football when England won the Euros.
“We’re a team of big dreamers, so we would love to have 100,000 players this season. After the [Women’s] World Cup last summer, on one Saturday we had 300 people sign up and then by that Monday night we had 1,000 sign-ups, so we thought: ‘OK, let’s start to actually put marketing into this and build a community.’
“Before the season kicked off in October we were at 10,000 and we were so excited by that because Jimmy [co-founder Jimmy Thompson] and I have worked in early-stage start-ups for most of our careers and we know that getting to even your first 1,000 customers is very hard.”
Last season, the England goalkeeper Mary Earps was the most-selected player, followed by Katie McCabe – despite her picking up a joint-high eight yellow cards – and the game’s top points scorer was the WSL’s golden boot winner, Bunny Shaw. But the focus isn’t just on the internationals. In fact, the co-creators specifically wanted to raise awareness of the WSL’s lesser-known talents.
“That was really important for us, and to enable our own knowledge,” says Gonçalves, who grew up in such a football-mad family that her brother was named Ronaldo. “It’s now nice there’s an extra element to the fan experience that we’re able to provide.”
Of their users, approximately 50% are newcomers to fantasy football and 75% are women, about 20% are male and 5% are non-binary or trans. That is one major contrast from the FPL game, but there are other significant differences too.
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A feature for the new season rewards choosing rarely selected players if they score points. Additionally, the creators have noted that the WSL typically has more goals scored than men’s football – in the past four seasons, the WSL has averaged 3.17 goals per game compared with 2.91 goals per game in the Premier League – and that brings a different dynamic to the points system.
Fantasy WSL’s director of strategy, Izzy Duddy, is an avid Arsenal Women fan who became obsessed with the WSL while watching behind-closed-doors matches on television during the pandemic and who describes the day the Lionesses won the Euros as the best of her life. “When you play FPL you probably put all your budget into your midfielders and your forwards,” she says. “Here, actually what people will find is it’s the defenders and the goalkeepers you need to look at.
“We always say: ‘Women’s football isn’t the afterthought.’ It’s centred around it. We always focus on the specific audience women’s football has and the way people watch it.”
The group are well aware their unofficial status leaves them vulnerable to an official product taking over. They have at least one rival product, a longer-established website called ShePlays, based in Australia, which has been running fantasy games for multiple competitions including the NWSL, Australian A-League and Women’s Champions League, for more seasons.
For its WSL game, ShePlays’ leaderboard illustrates a growth from 1,513 to 3,849 users in the 2022-23 campaign. But Fantasy WSL hopes its partnership with the WSL’s stats provider, Opta/Stats Perform, which allows its points tallies to be updated instantly after a goal, can give it an edge.
It is also heartened by support from the women’s football industry, through sponsorships and prizes being donated. “The community aspect has really shocked me,” Gonçalves says. “We’ve received an outpouring from fans and other people in business who have had so much time for us. It’s restored my faith in humanity.”