My Fantasy Football Team... Dominating

I've been on a tear with my fantasy football team recently.

Surprisingly, I don't have any Giants, Chiefs, or Buccaneers on my team. Instead, it's populated with players from the Bolton Wanderers, Wigan Athletic, and Hull City.

No, I'm not in a fantasy NFL league. I'm in a fantasy English Premiership league.

This is my first experience playing any sort of fantasy sports, and I'm absolutely loving it.

For the month of November, I won a league that has seven English guys living in Xi'an and myself participating. We each throw down 50RMB into the pot each month for the winner. So there will be 350RMB (about $50) coming to me once I track all of these guys down!

As the only American competing in a league against eight other Englishmen, I'm quite proud of the domination I enjoyed over them in November.

Here is the results table from my league, Xi'an Yuan, for November:


My squad, named Slug Dubbin' after one of my favorite tracks by The Orb, had an incredible month. I was ranked 11,686 out of the 1,761,849 total players. That means that I was better than 99.33% of the players all over the world playing this game in November.

This is a graphic I like seeing, my ranking on the leader board for the entire country of China for the month of November:



Here is my squad as it currently stands:



In addition to having a good November, I'm doing pretty well overall as well. Being ranked 54,586, I'm beating 97% of the players worldwide.

The basic rules for this version of fantasy Premiership are as follows:

Each team owner is given £100 million to work with. Each team must have two goal keepers, five defenders, five mid-fielders, and three forwards. Each week, you can make one transaction for free (each additional transaction costs you four points). Each team can only have three players from any one team, so you can not load up on all Chelsea, Liverpool, or Manchester United players.

Without a doubt, Christiano Ronaldo has been the key pick up for me. Ronaldo was this week named "Eupopean Footballer of the Year." He is a freak. He picks up insane amounts of points in this game.

Participating in this league has been a blast so far. It's given me the chance to get reengaged with the Premier League, after not paying attention at all last year.

One of the most bizarre consequences of living in Xi'an, China for almost three years is that I have learned so much about English culture from the loads of English people whom I work with. They far outnumber Americans in Xi'an, at least from the people I've been exposed to.

Strangely, right now I could have a better conversation with an English bloke about the current state of the English Premiership than I could with an American dude about the happenings of the NFL.

China does strange things to people.