Fantasy Premier League is back to ruin our lives. Bring it on

The Premier League returns tomorrow night and while this is of course an Objectively Good Thing, especially with the return of fans (and all these intriguing narratives about whether Steve Bruce-esque characters, having “got away with it” in empty stadiums for a season, will immediately be toast now that their respective juries are back in session), I’m feeling a certain degree of queasy unease about the whole thing.

Ongoing PTSD from the Euros final? Undoubtedly. The likelihood of total Citeh domination with or without the addition of Harry Kane? I fear so. But the main factor, and it’s not a dignified thing to admit, is that I’ve allowed myself to be sucked back into Fantasy Premier League.

I’ve had a couple of seasons out of the FPL game and I can quite comfortably say that my life has been vastly less stressful without its constant, malignant presence, lurking away as my mental screensaver, the prism through which all football-related news gets filtered, the thing I flick to on my phone “for a quick check” at the start of a long train journey and somehow am still wrestling with 45 minutes later.

It is an addiction that does not build to any thrilling or devastating crescendo, but merely chases its own miserable tail on an endless, joyless loop, its cruellest trick being the delusion that the more time one sinks into it, the better one gets at it. I’ve sunk a hell of a lot of time into it. And I am absolute rubbish.

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been some high points. Ooh boy! Even a stopped clock will triple-captain Sergio Aguero against Newcastle once in its lifetime. The photographic level of detail with which I can remember my FPL “bangers” is a damning indictment of my mental priorities in and of itself.

I can remember having Marko Arnautovic in February 2016 when his two goals against Aston Villa transformed my mood on an afternoon train journey home from Newport despite the fact that I’d been fined on the outbound journey for accidental fare evasion and then died on my arse to an audience of children. I can remember having Romelu Lukaku in February 2017 when he scored four (four!) against Bournemouth and I found myself too over excited to fulfil my co-hosting duties on Rob Beckett’s Absolute Radio show.

And I can remember having Gerard Deulofeu in February (why always February?) 2019, when he scored a hat-trick against Cardiff. Why does the vividness of that last memory stick quite so painfully in the craw? Because my daughter was a week old, and everything else around that time was, as the cliche goes, a blur. But not Gerard. Even amidst the brain-jazz of sterilisation and sleep deprivation, I still found time to momentarily triumph in my Spanish prince, before immediately regretting that I’d not made him my captain.

This is the fundamental cruelty of FPL: it feeds on the agony of the path not taken. If you’re the kind of person who’s remotely inclined towards regret – and I’m an absolute sucker for the stuff – FPL can make an immediate mockery of any momentary triumph with a thousand ways in which it could have been even better: the people who made even smarter (luckier) choices in your league (b*******!), the one person paraded on the homepage with (of all the millions of users) the week’s highest score (how did they do that? How? HOW?), the equally agonising homepage offering of the best possible team you could have picked (well obviously I should have just picked those exact 15 players!), or, if not any of those, then merely the near-certainty that whatever fleeting march you’ve stolen on your competitors will be ballsed up the following week.

Anyway, I’m doing it this season, because one: I’m taking part in an FPL podcast, which promises to be a fun way to exorcise at least some of the stress that participating in it will have caused me in the first place, and two: I’m pleased to have kept up my broadly respectable history of semi-topical team names with “Social Distincing” (“Boateng McBoatface” still the all-time high point, though the less said about 2017’s abysmally rushed “Fields of Wheater” the better).

As a lower league football fan (whose team are currently top after one game under the benevolent new chairmanship of an Australian plumbing tycoon), I am saved at least from the most despicable of FPL crimes: secretly celebrating goals against your (real) team because someone in your (fantasy) team got the assist.

But my main resolution, as it has been many times before, is not to give my decisions any thought at all until 15 minutes before the weekly deadline. At which point, I can make my changes (simple, logical, broadly consistent with prevailing trends) in a frenzy of time-sensitive concentration, get it all perfectly locked in, miss the deadline by a minute due to internet issues, hate myself, then watch as last week’s choices get more points than the team I intended to change it to and sink into a pit of relief/further existential malaise. Bring. It. On.