What is Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football?

[Garyalanlawro]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to introduce our new fantasy football game, Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football, which launched at the start of the 2013/4 English premier league season and is free to download and play on any smartphone or tablet. The game currently has 11,716 managers and was developed partly in response to feedback we received from FISO members to an online survey that we posted at survey-on-fantasy-football-responses-ap ... 99449.html.

The way the game works is like “Football Manager for live football”, where you sign up to manage a single club (usually your favourite) in real-time. The game tells you what team your club is playing next and you select your best lineup, subs bench and team formation. You have access to all the players available to the real-life manager; barring injuries, suspensions, etc. All lineup and bench changes are frozen 5mins before kick-off. During the live match, you can then make live substitutions, a first in fantasy football, depending on how you feel your players are performing.

For every player and sub you choose, you will be given a score at the end of the match and you overall score will be compared to the real-life manager. If you have a higher score, you beat your manager. In order to obtain the scores for each player, the game uses an advanced scoring method that looks at over 100 different player performance activities (e.g. distance covered, passes completed, shots on target). When selecting players for your team in the game, a predicted score for each player in the squad (which is the predicted likely statistical score that could be reasonably expected of that player based on previous performances) is listed beside his name. If the player doesn’t play in the real match, the predicted score is the score we use, if the player does play in real-life, that score is replaced by their actual performance score for that match (their calculated score). The formulas behind the scoring have been developed from a huge analysis of data (nearly 2.8million data points) from the English Premier League over several years. In testing over last season (2012/3), the predicted scores for players who did not play particular matches were out by less than 4% when compared to the calculated scores for all players over the full season.

For example, the manager of your favourite team plays a particular line-up of 11 players and 3 subs for a given game, while you make your own choices from the same 25-man squad. If a particular football player plays well in real-life but is only on the pitch for a limited time, a game user who chose that player for the entire game will get a calculated score for that position higher than that obtained by the actual team Manager. The opposite is also true; if a player plays badly and is substituted earlier (than you) by the Manager for a better player, you will get a lower score than the Manager. Players which are not played by the Manager and which are selected by you are given the predicted score.

Unlike other fantasy football leagues, new game users won’t be penalised for joining late - whenever you join, you get the same points that the real-life Manager has accumulated, so you are instantly competing with him. You are also ranked on a “per-game” basis in the “Leaderboards” section on our website, so you can just test your skills for one match if you like.

You are automatically logged into a “Personal” league that tracks your performance versus all 20 EPL Managers over the full season so you can see how your club would have fared if you were the Manager. You are also automatically logged into a “Club” league that compares your performance to other users who manage your club. As with regular fantasy football leagues, you can also set up “Private” leagues among family & friends and go head-to-head over the season.

The game also generates real-time “fanalytics” data on what fans are thinking about the live match (e.g. who is the most popular striker, who is out of favour with the fans). This gives a real insight into the thoughts of fans of individual clubs.

To download the game, just search for “Beat Your Manager” in the Appstore or Google Playstore or follow the link for Android at http://goo.gl/WlNfJX or iPhone at http://tinyurl.com/BeatYourManageriOS. You can find more information at http://www.beatyourmanager.ie (including some instructional videos), follow us at http://www.twitter.com/beatyourmanager (@beatyourmanager) and become a fan at http://www.facebook.com/beatyourmanager.

We’re a startup so we’ll be developing the game and website over the rest of the season and next. We’d love to get some feedback so feel free to try out the game and tell us what you think.

Thanks for reading!

The Beat Your Manager! Team