RULES
The Roster
Your team = five rosters. One from each of the Big Five Leagues — the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, and Ligue 1.
The Management
Each week, you take two actions:
Bench two of your eight players on each roster.
Designate one captain per roster (2× multiplier).
The Scoring
It's complicated (see below). The big idea is that every position matters, not just forwards.
Each player gets one score per week: the highest he records in a single game. (If he plays two games, only his best result counts.)
The lowest score of your six starters is dropped automatically. ("Doh! My guy was a surprise bench" doesn't stick you with a zero. Unless you have two surprise benches — then you're toast. Should have paid attention!)
Silverware
The League Title: finish at the top of the table and you win. Cumulative points, all season, nothing else. Ties break on best single week, then most weekly wins.
The Ligazo Cup: each week, you're matched up against another team, and you win or lose (NFL fantasy style). The first 22 weeks of the season are cup qualifying, and the top eight advance to the Ligazo Cup playoffs.
The Drafts
Build your rosters with five slow drafts: one for each league. (If that feels like too much fantasy fútbol action for you, then perhaps you would like a simpler, tamer version of all this. Go ahead!)
What's a slow draft? Instead of 30 seconds between picks, you get hours — the commissioner sets the clock (default 4). Or 2, or 6. They go on for days and allow groups to draft without carving out magical 3-hour blocks of time.
Dead clock? The system drafts the best legal player from your ranked queue — or, with an empty queue, best available. The draft never stalls.
Snake order: each round reverses. Picks run 1 through 12, then 12 back through 1, and so on for all eight rounds — so if you pick last in one round, you pick first in the next.
Your draft slot is drawn once, then staggered across the five leagues: we draw the twelve-manager order a single time, at random — nobody chooses their own seat. That drawn order runs the first draft (La Liga); for every league after it the whole order shifts by five seats, so the premium early picks travel around the room instead of belonging to whoever won the draw. With five drafts there are only ten top-two slots to share, so ten of twelve managers land a top-two pick and two just miss — but the rotation still hands everyone at least a top-three somewhere, and no one ever picks first more than once. It's as level as a single random draw allows.
Roster Construction
Eight players per roster, and that's the only limit: any eight players you like. No minimums — no required defenders, midfielders, forwards, or goalkeeper. Draft eight forwards if you want to. (Hint: the scoring is designed to make all positions valuable.)
One keeper per roster. That's the only limited position. Also, keepers are a team position: you don't draft a team's starting keeper; you draft their GK slot (whoever plays counts for you).
Team Management
The Bench: each week, in each roster of eight, you start up to six and bench the rest. The lowest score of your starters is dropped. (Your "whoops, they benched Joelinton but I started him" fail won't stick you with a zero. Two fails will.)
The Captain: each week, you designate one player on each roster to be your captain. His best single match counts double — the bonus is never negative — and you can only use it on the same player six times each season; a captain use only counts if the player logs at least one minute. (Also: if your captain plays zero minutes, you get to assign it to someone else once his club's match ends — assuming he wasn't the last guy to play that week.)
Nothing locks until kickoff: bench and armband changes apply the moment you save them, and each player locks individually at his club's first kickoff of the week.
Do nothing and nothing breaks: last week's six and captain carry forward automatically. A never-set squad defaults to your six highest scorers on Monday morning. Skipping a week is never an advantage — or a catastrophe.
Add/Drop: during the week, you can place a Free Agent Acquisition Bid on any free agent from any league. This is a blind auction, and the bidding closes Sunday night (okay, it's actually 3 AM ET). Updates are processed Monday morning. You can only add one player per week — use it or lose it — and your budget is shared with your Transfer warchest. Opening window exception (weeks 1–3): while the summer window is open the one-add cap is lifted and the wire clears EVERY morning, not just Monday — add as many free agents as you like to chase the real-world churn. Speaking of that...
Transfers: offer to buy anyone's players using your remaining FAAB warchest (everyone starts with 100). Make and accept offers any time — the deal itself transfers on Monday morning of the next open window (the last transfers of a window execute on the Monday of its final week). To prevent shenanigans, each player has a minimum AND a maximum price (see the formulas below). This is the only "trading" component available, and you can't swap players. You may only buy them.
Scoring fine print
Balanced by design: in this scoring setup, all positions score roughly the same amount of points. Hundreds of thousands of Monte Carlo simulations are no match for reality, though, so you may find a way to break that. Anyway, here are the details:
| GK | DEF | MID | FWD | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Appearance (60+ minutes) | +2 | +2 | +2 | +2 |
| Appearance (under 60) | +1 | +1 | +1 | +1 |
| Goal | +10 | +6 | +5 | +4 |
| Assist | +3 | +3 | +3 | +3 |
| Clean sheet (60+ minutes) | +4 | +4 | +1 | — |
| Every 2 goals conceded | −1 | −1 | — | — |
| Every 2 saves | +1 | — | — | — |
| Penalty save | +5 | — | — | — |
| Penalty miss | −2 | −2 | −2 | −2 |
| Yellow card | −1 | −1 | −1 | −1 |
| Red card | −3 | −3 | −3 | −3 |
| Own goal | −2 | −2 | −2 | −2 |
| Defensive contribution (every 8 actions; every 10 for MID/FWD) | — | +1 | +1 | +1 |
| Every 2 shots on target | +1 | +1 | +1 | +1 |
| Every 3 key passes | +1 | +1 | +1 | +1 |
Source of truth: every stat comes from the Sportmonks match-data API — one source, for everyone, all season. Not FotMob, not the broadcast, not what you swear you saw.
The scoring week is Monday–Sunday. A player with two matches scores the sum.
Partial weeks are normal: not every league plays every week — leagues stagger openers, run midweek rounds, and pause for internationals. Your score is whatever your five rosters produce; if only one league is playing that week, that's your week (Christmas week, for instance, is Premier League-only). A player whose club has two matches that week keeps his best one.
Blank weeks: international breaks blank the whole calendar a few weeks a season. They score zero for everyone, nothing locks and nothing burns, and the cup schedules around them — no qualifying round lands on a blank week. The Monday run still happens: wire bids settle and your six carries forward as normal.
On-pitch only: clean sheets and conceded goals count only while the player is on the pitch.
League matchdays only: no cups, no Europe, no relegation playoffs.
Frozen means final: scores freeze Tuesday 18:00 America/Denver after the scoring week closes. Later corrections are ignored, and frozen weeks are never rescored.
The calendar: week 1 begins Monday August 17, 2026; 41 scoring weeks through late May.
The matrix is frozen for the season (Appendix A of the design document). Disputes are settled by the frozen weekly table, nothing else.
Cup qualifying ties: points, then aggregate total, then best single matchup.
Market fine print
The wire auction: highest bid wins; ties go to the worse table position (dead points-ties break by a seeded weekly draw, and only FROZEN weeks count as the table); zero bids are legal. Winning bids are spent — paid to nobody. Losing bids cost nothing. The wire closes for good after the final week's Monday run.
Contingency bids: seal bids on several players if you like — the first one you win consumes your weekly add and voids the rest.
Sales settle first on Monday, so a bid is checked against what's actually left in your warchest.
Drops hit the wire: dropped players — yours, or a seller's named drop — become free agents, biddable at the next Monday auction.
The floor: minimum sale price tracks a player's RECENT form — his points over the last six weeks his league played, ÷ 2, rounded up, minimum 1 (from the frozen table). Why recent form and not the season total: accumulated points say what a player WAS worth; a transfer needs what he's worth NOW. An injured, benched, cold, or sold-out-of-the-league player's floor falls so you can actually move him — while anyone still producing keeps a floor high enough that he can't be dumped. In the summer window (weeks 1–3, before there's any recent form) the floor anchors on established value instead: the higher of this-season-so-far and last season, ÷ 10. Free agents have no floor; the auction is the price.
The ceiling: maximum sale price = 4 × the floor + 10. Overpaying a friend is not a donation channel — credit gifts are banned in mechanics, not just in spirit.
The windows: weeks 1–3 (Aug 17 – Sep 6, 2026); weeks 21–24 (Jan 4 – Jan 31, 2027). Offers queue year-round; deals land only in a window. The rest of the season, the wire is the only way players move.
Deals are atomic: player to buyer, buyer names a drop, credits to seller. Accepted deals land Monday morning, before waivers; unaccepted offers expire then.
Sell whoever you want: any player on your roster, the club GK included. There are no minimums to protect you from yourself.
Short rosters stay short: sell someone and you're down a body until YOU choose to refill with a pure add on the wire. Nothing refills it for you, and nothing warns you. If you'd queued a swap bid, the wire still drops the player you named — it will not quietly skip your drop to patch the hole.
Window close: offers and accepts work at any time, but each window's LAST transfers execute on the Monday morning of its final week. An accept that lands after that waits for the next window — or dies with the season.
Everything is public: balances and every price. Credits move only inside a sale — gifts are banned.
No autopilot: dead teams are dead teams; the drop-lowest six keeps their rosters scoring while their captain budgets burn out.
Armband fine print
Burned out: a player at six uses cannot take the armband (greys out).
"Played" means minutes: any logged minutes count (matches the appearance-point line in the matrix; zero judgment calls). Zero minutes is exactly what triggers the release rule.
Doubling never hurts: captain bonus = max(0, best single match). Negative best match, zero bonus — and no use burns.
No captain, no burn: if the captain never plays and the armband wasn't (or couldn't be) moved after release, that league has no captain that week and nothing burns.
Quarantine: new pickups wait three weeks before wearing it — no captaincy-laundering through churn. A player returned by a voided sale keeps his ORIGINAL clock; the innocent party serves nothing.
The freeze has the final word: the six-use cap is enforced at the weekly freeze, and the bonus lands there too — live totals never include it. A stale carried armband can never become a seventh use.
The carry: last week's captain carries forward past blank weeks. A week you deliberately leave captain-less STAYS captain-less — the carry never overrides a lapse you chose.
Budgets are public: everyone's remaining armband count is visible to the league.