It feels daft me saying the football season is only 9 days away, when in fact The Ashes cricket series is only starting today at Edgbaston. The Ashes are starting later than perhaps they usually would and the football season if creeping forward in August. The Premier League starts on Friday 9th August when the mighty Liverpool take on Norwich.
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| Lords Cricket - England v Ireland July 2019 |
Last year I had a lot of fun play fantasy football, you can take it as seriously as you like, it is after all just a bit of bit of fun, but I had a lot of fun analysing the data, the statistics and picking what I thought would be a great team. Data is a big deal in football and sport in general, as year on year the game and moves more and more towards data driven decisions – Money Ball!
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| Wolves v Crusaders July 2019 (Europa League) |
There is no doubt a lot of football fans in the SQL Server community and no doubt some of these play fantasy football too so I thought I’d put together a private league that we can join to see who manages the best team through the course of the season.
With fantasy football there is a lot of data available that you can use to analyse and slice and dice to allow you to make decisions on the best players to pick in your team. Allowing you to get the most of your £100 Million, the fictional amount you have to build your team – your constraint. The value of the player can fluctuate over the course of a season and you can make transfers each week too so can grow or even lose some of that £100 Million – you are limited to 1 free transfer a week but you can buy more transfers by sacrificing points. Details of how the scoring works and a full set of rule are available on the fantasy.premierleague.com
I have decided to run a bit of competition on the blog just for fun to see if anyone else is interested.
I thought we could have a league of our own…. If you would like to join in and play, its open to everyone so feel free to sign up. Click this link and use the registration form at the bottom of the page. This will add you my mailing list for the league, all you need is your name and email addresses. I’ll send you an email that will contain a link to the fantasy football site (You can find that link below too) and also include the league code and some instructions on how to join. You will need the league code to join the league I have created. Enter that code into the "Join a League" section of fantasy.premierleague.com to enter your team into the league and we can have a bit of fun with a League of our own. The site we will use is fantasy.premierleague.com the official premier league fantasy football and we follow all the rules and T&Cs for that site for playing the game. I'll keep you updated from time to time with league updates... There is no prize for winning the league (I am not the organised) yet, but I'll see what I can put together, I'm sure I have a cup and some pens lying around, they will only be very small prizes, its just for fun but I'll confirm if I have managed to secure any and what they are at a later date.
However you pick your side and however make your transfers, whether its gut instinct or you use extensive data analysis or even using machine learning algorithms to help you make those critical decisions it will help keep the football season fun and also maybe learn some things too especially if you use ML to make picks and selections…
Follow this link and signup using the form at the bottom of the landing page to get involved.
