At 11am BST on Monday morning, Fantasy EFL was launched.
It is a free fantasy football/soccer online game, a spin-off from Fantasy Premier League (FPL), which has 11 million-plus players and covers the top league in English football.
Fantasy EFL instead covers the English Football League (EFL), encompassing the second, third and fourth tier in England: the Championship, League One, and League Two. That includes the likes of Leeds United and Sunderland, as well as Wrexham, co-owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
So how does it work and how is it different from FPL? The Athletic explains all.
How do you create a team in Fantasy EFL?
Every week, you pick seven players from across all the matches in the EFL that week. There is no limit to how many times you can choose a player during the season.
You can only pick a maximum of two players from one club every week, with gameweeks running from Thursday to Wednesday. You also have to pick two clubs every week in the hope they will score points for your team.
You can pick one of three formations for your players to line up in: 1-2-2-2, 1-3-2-1 or 1-2-3-1, depending on how many defenders, midfielders and attackers you want. There is always one goalkeeper.
Once your team is picked, you’re entered into the overall leaderboard, where everyone battles for prizes, including a season ticket for the 2025-26 season, and two tickets to the Championship play-off final next year along with hotel accommodation and a behind-the-scenes tour of Wembley Stadium.
You can also create private leagues to compete directly against friends or colleagues.
Wait, you have to pick two clubs? How does that work?
An unusual feature is selecting clubs as well as players. The seven players/two clubs split is a reference to the 72 clubs that make up the three EFL divisions, from Accrington Stanley to Wycombe Wanderers.
But, unlike players, there is a limit on how many times you can select clubs: a maximum of five times per season. So there is no choosing, say, Championship heavyweights Leeds United every week.
Wrexham are among the teams included in Fantasy EFL (Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images)
How do clubs score points?
Clubs get five points when they win at home, seven points when they win away, three points when they draw, two points when they keep a clean sheet, and two when they score two or more goals.
How do players score points?
Every player scores points for making an appearance (one point up to 59 minutes, two points for more than 60 minutes), providing an assist (three points) and scoring a hat-trick (five points), but loses points for receiving a yellow card (minus one), red card (minus three), and missing a penalty (minus three).
Goalkeepers receive points for every clean sheet (five points), every three saves (two points) and for saving a penalty (three points). Defenders also get five points for keeping a clean sheet, with one point also gained for every three clearances, two blocks, or two successful tackles.
If a goalkeeper or defender scores a goal, not including own goals, they score seven points. Plus, goalkeepers and defenders lose a point for every two goals the team concedes, and must have played more than 60 minutes to get those clean sheet points.
Midfielders score six points for goals, with a point for every two shots on target or two key passes, and two points for every interception. Forwards score five points per goal and one point for every two shots on target or two key passes.
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Who are the most expensive players and clubs?
Good question. You have exactly 72 clubs and almost 2,000 players to choose from across more than 1,600 fixtures, so there are plenty of options.
However, there are no player or club prices at all. Zero. In FPL, player prices range from £4million (e.g. bargain-bucket backup goalkeepers) to £15m (Manchester City superstar Erling Haaland), with an overall limit of £100m.
There is none of that in Fantasy EFL: only the set limits on players (maximum two per club) and clubs (selecting them a maximum of five times per season). This means there is no budgeting and squeezing in less desirable, cheaper players to allow yourself the room to afford the more expensive ones. You can go wild.
Some of the most popular early picks? Blackburn’s Sammie Szmodics and Leeds winger Crysencio Summerville, who scored 27 and 20 goals respectively in the Championship last season, are owned by 61.3 per cent and 46.4 per cent of teams at the moment.
Wrexham striker Paul Mullin, Burnley midfielder Josh Brownhill, and Sheffield United midfielder Callum O’Hare are among the others with more than 10 per cent ownership. Among defenders and goalkeepers, Leeds’ Illan Meslier, Cardiff City’s Perry Ng and Bolton Wanderers’ Ricardo Santos are popular picks, too.
Josh Brownhill of Burnley is already proving popular (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)
How do transfers work?
Essentially, they are unlimited. With no player pricing and no limit on transfers, you essentially get the FPL equivalent of a Wildcard every single week, with a completely blank slate to rip up your old team and start afresh with a shiny new team, as long as you abide by those aforementioned player and club limits.
If you forget to make transfers or are unable to update your team, your team remains the same and your existing players will still score points. For your clubs, if it means you will exceed your five-time cap on selecting clubs, random ones will be chosen instead.
Are there any chips?
There is just one chip in Fantasy EFL: a ‘Max Captain’ chip, available twice a season, which makes the highest-scoring player in your team at the end of the gameweek your captain for that week.
The Max Captain chip can only be played before the first game of a gameweek, but can also be de-selected before the first game of the gameweek, too.
The first one is available between July 15, 2024, and January 31, 2025, with the second available from February 1, 2025, until the end of the season. But if you do not use your first before February 1, it does not roll over.
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How does captaincy work?
Every week, you select one player to be your captain. They earn double points for that week. You also pick a vice-captain to take the virtual armband from your captain if your skipper is ill, injured or otherwise absent.
Something else affecting captaincy is the prospect of ‘lockout’. In FPL, once the pre-gameweek deadline has passed, you cannot make any changes. But in Fantasy EFL, matches ‘lockout’ individually. So once a game (say Leeds vs Coventry) kicks off, you cannot amend or swap out your Leeds and Coventry players, but you can make changes to players and clubs whose matches have not been played yet.
You can change your captain an unlimited number of times until your chosen captain becomes locked. Likewise the vice-captain.
A lot of Fantasy EFL managers have picked Sammie Szmodics of Blackburn Rovers (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
What about team names?
Who doesn’t love the prospect of picking a unique, punny team name?
For fans of Luton’s second-choice goalkeeper Tim Krul, perhaps Only Kruls and Horses or Krul Intentions; Wigan Athletic and Crystal Palace fans (as well as my five-a-side team) might reference their former defender with One Size Fitz Hall; and new Huddersfield signing Herbie could be Citizen Kane.
What else?
There will likely be some teething technical issues when it comes to the game.
For example, the lack of an option to filter players by position is a fairly basic tool currently missing and who knows how the website/app will handle the surge of people making last-minute decisions just before gameweek deadlines.
Overall, though, while some parts feel a bit gimmicky, it seems like a simpler (albeit broader) and more accessible version of FPL, which should keep fantasy managers engaged throughout the campaign.
On the other hand, the lack of player prices and the subsequent selection balancing act that entails means there will likely be very similar teams when it becomes clear who the heavy hitters across the divisions are, which generally makes for a boring end to the fantasy season.
That said, a fresh initiative capitalising on the interest across the entire EFL, not just the Premier League, should be applauded. FPL started with just 76,000 managers and grew to more than 11 million — watch this space to see if Fantasy EFL will follow a similar trajectory.
There are three weeks until the EFL season begins with a Championship double-header under the Friday night lights on August 9, so you have plenty of time to pick your team.
Let the games begin.
(Top photo: Leeds United celebrates Crysencio Summerville’s goal for Leeds against Norwich City last season; by Michael Regan via Getty Images)
