From the beautiful game to the nerdy weekend obsession

PRESENT TENSE:Following football used to be relatively easy, but now it's a good deal more complicated, and time-consuming, thanks to the rise of fantasy football, writes SHANE HEGARTY

HAVING DEVELOPED an obsession with sport and teams, due to an expensive habit he’s acquired for Match Attax collectable cards, my five-year-old son has been asking me what soccer team I support. I keep batting away the question, mumbling things about just wanting a good match and the best team to win. Nonsense.

I can’t tell my son that I support Kilo Ramblers, a mediocre team in what is literally the biggest league in the world. Not the “biggest league” in the way that the Premier League boasts it is – although there is a connection – but a league with, when I last looked, 1,909,869 teams. Two years ago I came 9,244th in the online Fantasy Premier League. Trust me when I say I believe it to have been my greatest sporting achievement in 20 years.

Fantasy football involves picking a team within a budget, hoping the players rack up points based on their performances on the weekend, and then bringing players in or out, depending on how they’re doing.

I am the manager of Kilo Ramblers and its ragtag team of top-class talent and crocks, of Chelsea and Manchester United stars, Arsenal midfield dynamos, Wigan carthorses and Stephen Hunt.

Which means that for 90 minutes every Saturday I couldn’t care less about wanting a good match. I want a particular Wolves defender to pop up from the back and pass the ball to someone who will score. I want Sunderland’s main keeper to stay injured for a while longer so the sub goalie gets a run. I want the points for assists and goals and just being on the pitch at all. I also want to be free of this obsession. But I’m paid up for another year, so that’s not going to happen.

The film Knocked Uphas a running plot in which one of the characters suspects her husband is cheating on her. He is clearly hiding something and lying about why he's late home from work. She eventually tracks him down to a strange house, and bursts in to find him in the shameful act of playing fantasy baseball with his friends.

Knocked Upis a particularly male film for one about pregnancy, and that scene is one many men will have understood immediately. Because at this time of year about one man in 50 is chasing down the other 49 for the €20 joining fee for the sub-league that's been set up at work, sending group e-mails along the lines of, "Gentlemen, does anyone know who owns Halitosis Hotspur . . .?"

While not exclusively so, it is a particularly male pursuit. I’m in one league of more than 80 teams, but only four of them are managed by women. In The Irish Times’s league, five of the 22 teams are run by female colleagues, which isn’t a bad proportion but surely not what the feminist pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s must have hoped for when they sought societal liberalisation, workplace equality and a cheap central defender who could weigh in with the occasional goal.

Perhaps it feeds into several male obsessions: the love of sport, competition, gambling, statistics; of believing themselves better managers than any of the professionals; of an absolute certainty that they can predict future events; of collecting; of wasting time on pointless pursuits.

Whatever the reasons, it means that on a Friday evening many men are lost in a dark corner of their mind, in which their best and most active brain cells are trying to decide if they should play two or three up front.

It means Saturday morning panic if they haven’t changed their team and they’re not within range of a computer. It means a weekend twitchiness as they walk the DIY shop hunting for a phone signal that will give them updates from Blackpool vs West Brom.

I quite like the idea that it could be worse. Last year Barry Glendenning, an Irish journalist at the Guardian, wrote about how fantasy football's invention in the early 1990s meant that "productivity in offices promptly dropped by 81.52 per cent, leading to the current global recession, which experts have blamed on shoddy banking practices instead of hundreds of thousands of blokes called Darren wasting hours trying to figure out how to accommodate Nicolas Anelka without having to ship out Leighton Baines or Ryan Shawcross".

Anyway, I’ve figured out how to explain it to my son. Fantasy football is Match Attax for grown-ups. And I’m Kilo Ramblers till I die. Or till I forget to pay the money before the start of next season.

Ross O’Carroll Kelly is resting