27 December, 1999 - (SEASON ONE/S1)

How to Create A Fantasy Football League
Ever wanted to create a Fantasy Football League of your own? Well your in luck, here's Soccer All Stars advice on how to get started and what you need to survive and keep successful!

There are around 3-4 free leagues in existence at this point in time on the Internet. That's to my knowledge. There is no true right way to run a footy league, so what you will read on is simply what I believe is the best way to get things done based on experience. I've been in the fantasy football world for well over a year now. I have worked with the the best and done most ways of running sites. From that I will give you my advice to making the best possible free fantasy football site you can. I am the originator of free fantasy football leagues of this kind, so I hope I can give you good advice and help point you in the right direction.

Running a fantasy football site is not an easy job. It's extremely stressful. You make decisions that affect people's opinions, you have to write up matches and reports, constantly and get complained to A LOT. The first key to a good fantasy football league is to spread out your power. The goal here is not to be the boss of something, rather for everyone to have as much fun as possible. So before you even get your league started, find 2-4 people that you can trust who are interested in fantasy football, divide positions up and jobs up, and create something similar to the Football Association, Football League or FIFA. You can then vote on major problems and keep the league running smoothly, working as fallbacks for one another. The best fantasy football leagues were never run by one man. You must remember this. If you choose a board to help with a voting system you must stick by it. You may be sitting there and wondering that your site was a one-man band... well is it still standing? Are you still doing it? The chances are that you've already packed it in due to the work load. Yeah it may have been good and good for some time but you can't sustain the work over long periods by yourself, remember that!

The second thing to do is to decide how you're league is going to be run. Perhaps your Board should vote on this, if you choose to use one. Should you use a program or simulator of some kind to generate results? Or perhaps you should hand type matches? My advice is to start your league up using a simulator if you can find one or make one. Most leagues hand type now, but that's because they either have not got access to a simulator or they've got the staff capable of managing. The second key to a good fantasy league is your match quality. Let the people read what happens, don't just give out winners and losers. It's boring and unimaginative that way. The more members you have writing quality cards the more variety and entertainment you are giving your managers. Seeing as they'll be putting a lot of effort into their roleplaying then they will be expected to see something back in return.

Third on your agenda should be deciding how roleplaying should take place. I've roleplayed on message boards, e-mail, and newsgroups. From experience, I seem to prefer role-playing. Roleplaying is fun as you get to see everyone's replies and feel an atmosphere for the site. However roleplaying via email is probably the most effective. They tend to be longer and more well thought out, and it's easy to communicate that way. Add in that you don't get distractions from other leagues or jerks, and you've got yourself ready in this respect. Either use Address Books to keep your roleplay List together, or use a mass mailing program like Listbot. I prefer the roleplay lists, they're easier to manage. However the only down side here is that new members and people wanting to join can't see the quality of roleplaying. You could provide samples of it on your sites for people to view but it's not the same kind of thing. The third key is to decide how roleplays will take place. 99+% of leagues use message boards, but this is perhaps the least efficient way and poorest quality. You usually get odd and silly messages there and sometimes questions when it's supposed to be for roleplays only. It's your decision on how to run things but on experience I've witnessed too much trouble on message boards for my own liking.

The fourth key is to now get a web site started. One of your Board members (or yourself) should have experience in a graphic design tool and with web pages. Create something that will catch a person's eye. Something that didn't take you 5 minutes. The better the web page, the more interested a person will be in your fantasy league. You must work hard on this aspect. Throwing a page together in a couple of hours won't get you anywhere. TAKE YOUR TIME and only release the site when it's COMPLETE! A half complete site will fall at the first hurdle! There were 8,000 hits tallied for Soccer All Stars in just a couple of weeks, but had no more than 20 members in it's league since it's roots in March 1998. Football Mania managed an astonishing 7,000+ in just 14 days! It's extremely important that you get a top notch web site, for this is what will keep a person's attention. Graphical tools to look out for are Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or Corel Draw. Whilst HTML editors, Netscape Communicator, Dreamweaver 2 and Microsoft Frontpage are the best. Other elements you should consider and navigation and screen resolutions.

Now comes the fun part. The fifth key is to come up with an original name. 'FA', 'FIFA', 'Premiership', and other copyrighted names should always be avoided. Using these types of professional names on the web doesn't prove to a person that you're a good league. It's also highly illegal. Come up with an original name that will catch the person's eye. My personal favorites (all taken, sorry) are Football Mania, Top Flight Manager, Dream Teams, Euro League, Footiwarp and of course Soccer All Stars. The choice is up to you for a good fantasy league name. Once you've done this, come up with names (in advance) for all your board members, leagues divisions, titles and cup titles. It's important to be prepared with this stuff. Again, be original about it. Don't call your league the Premiership or Serie A. Most fantasy leagues seem to have 'soccer', 'league' or 'manager' somewhere in the title... I suggest avoiding this path as it will soon become too common.

There are many little details that you should attend to now. Small decisions that may affect the popularity of your site. Perhaps consider joining a football webring. These often result in more people visiting your site.  New leagues should consider joining one. Also decide if your going to run your league through roleplaying or just picking winners yourself. Roleplaying is probably more fun, but you'll have less troubles in the long run without it. Typing up match reports is really time consuming.  Another thing to look out for is original managers or not? The best roleplayers are usually the original ones. Anybody can copy Alex Ferguson or Cesere Maldini off TV.....so I suggest you try original managers. However, again, this may result in people turning away from your league. Key Number Six is to make all the minor decisions for your league like the ones I've mentioned above. Ask other sites to place a link of yours from theirs. Make exchanges and be nice. Don't worry about people leaving/switching between sites. It's healthy for competition and helps get the word around to attract more potential managers. You'll also have to decide on the type of league you'll be running. Will it be based with teams from one country, a mixture of two or all around the world. Through experience I've found that the English Leagues are the best to use. However Euro League have so far proved everyone wrong with teams from all around Europe pitted into one league. They are at the moment the most successful site in the history of Free fantasy league football. They've got over 8,000 hits in two months and are still growing in strength.

Ok, you've got all this done?! Great! Well, now start accepting applications to your league. Things will NOT work like a dream at first though.... People applying for your site will be scarce due to the lack of recognition at the present moment. Hopefully though you will have submitted to join the Soccer All Stars Network right now and we will attempt to traffic customers in your direction. This may not be the case for you. Get a nice little friendly Tournament started before the season (and declare a winner ASAP.) From here on it gets to be a little easier. There are only a few things I suggest you look out for.

In order to keep your league stable, I suggest you never give your opinion about who's winning to your managers. Don't tell them who's winning, who's going to win, who's the better roleplayer, anything. Keep it between you and your Board (if you have one). In this way, people can't whine to you throughout the week, and you can go on with life. From time to time you will get the occasional jerk or jerks in your league. Somebody who believes that he's better than you, that he should win every time, that he's the best, etc, etc. These are the people that will cause problems. Fire them from your league, don't take BS from them. If they say they think you're a horrible Chairman, live with it. Which would you rather be, a horrible Chairman or an Ex-Chairman of your league? If you let him have his way, it will lead to the downfall of your league. In order to please the rest of your league, kill him off in the next news report... some fatal car crash or something amusing. I enjoy the fact that we can be unrealistic about this at times, simply because we feel those that try and bring us down deserve to have it put up on the Internet for all to see. Plus it's a great stress reliever..... :) Also being fair and reasonable will earn your league and board with respect. This ends up usually with more people joining via word of mouth from managers.

Never let friendship affect your winners. People you know should not have the advantage over people you don't. Treat them as if you don't know them. If people kiss up to you constantly in an effort to look better, just judge them lower...give them less a chance of winning, or ignore them completely. These people are the kinda people who are your best friend in front of your face, and your worst enemy behind your back. Don't let it bother you, just completely ignore them. It's pointless being biased... because if you do, your not only cheating your managers who are making your league work, but also yourself.

If you follow the above steps, your chances for having a successful league should be greatly improved. Remember, having YourOwnName.Com only means something if you're league has really gotten itself up. SAS, FM, Dream Teams and TFM  go back a long way. In SAS's case as far back as March '98. They never got their own domains and were highly successful. Don't think Geocities or Angelfire is bad, use whatever you can to bring yourself to the top of the fantasy football world charts... we hope that come the millennium you'll be competing against the best for the Free Fantasy Football Website of the Year Award!

Finally I'd like to say a few words. Soccer All Stars is here to help and assist you. We will do all we can to help you but you must remember. When you do the work yourself you feel proud of it, and almost attach yourself to it. When it's your work you'll work to keep it up and better it. When it's someone else's and it goes wrong there's a feeling of 'Oh well'. Don't rely on others. Push yourself all the way. We'll do our best to get customers to your site but you've also got to do a lot of work. Inform all your internet friends, pass the word around, get managers to pass the word around and get banners put on other sites, not just football ones, friends too... Be sure to submit your sites to as many search engines as possible to really give yourself that chance. Advertising in chat rooms also helps...

Apart from all of this just remember one thing, have fun!!!

If you don't know how to code in HTML then you can start by visiting www.phplgoodies.com. HTML coding is very easy to learn. I have only been online just over a year and have created some smashing sites. Before that I knew absolutely nothing about HTML coding or graphical stuff.

Thanks a lot,

ScreamKing

(Executive Producer @ Soccer All Stars Management)

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