We’re pretty sure that many of you watching this video enjoy fantasy football. And if you’re a fan,
you surely know that Fantasy Premier League – or just FPL as it is famously
referred to as – is one of the most popular fantasy football leagues in the world.
Now, for those who don’t know what FPL is, it’s basically a fantasy league where you are
given a budget – usually 100 million pounds – to build your own 15-man squad of real life Premier
League players. The value of each player is determined by FPL themselves and it can
change as the season goes on depending on how the players perform during the course of the season.
You earn and lose points from how the players perform in the Premier League week in, week out.
You get points for goals, assists, saves, clean sheets… and of course, you lose points
for yellow and red cards, penalties missed, goals conceded, own goals, you know, stuff like that.
Now, once you join FPL, create your squad, and register to participate in a new season,
you automatically become part of a worldwide league along with
millions of other managers from around the globe.
Apart from that, you can join and even create smaller leagues with your friends and colleagues.
Or you can just join any random league if you don’t have any friends and you work alone.
But the main league is still, of course, the worldwide league.
If you finish at the top of that league by the end of the season,
you are crowned FPL champion, and there are so many amazing prizes that come with that.
The winner of the last one will get an all-expense-paid trip to the UK
which also involves VIP tickets to 2 Premier League games in the upcoming season. Apart
from that, they also get a Hublot watch, a Nike jacket, games console, and lots more.
But perhaps more importantly, that person gets insane bragging rights.
Sitting at the top of a table of millions is an insane achievement.
And only few understand that better than this chess grandmaster from Norway, Magnus Carlsen.
Carlsen, according to many, is the greatest chess prodigy there has ever been. Way back in 2004,
aged only 13 years, 148 days, he became the second-youngest chess grandmaster ever.
He didn’t stop there. At 19, he then became the youngest ever world’s number 1 in chess history.
And at the 2013 World Chess Championship, at the age of 22,
he beat Vishwanathan Anand to become the undisputed chess champion of the world.
Carlsen, who started playing chess at just 5 years old,
is said to now have the highest rating in chess history – 2872.
So, having done it all in chess, Carlsen decided to look for a new challenge,
and he turned to fantasy football; FPL in particular.
He first started playing in 2015,
and he very quickly realized that FPL was a totally different ball game from chess.
He might have been world number 1 in chess, but in FPL, he was world number 85,781.
But then, it was only his first year. He needed some time to get a good grasp of
the game and get used to it. So, at the end of the 2017-18 season,
after having played for three years, he managed to rise up to number 2,397 in the world.
But the thing is, FPL is not always a straightforward ride. Magnus Carlses,
who seemed to have been on an upward trajectory, fell to number 24,105 in the world in 2019.
The thing, though, is that he didn’t stop trying. Never did. And then in December of 2020,
usually the time when places on the Premier League table begin to solidify, Magnus Clarsen
blew up. This time, not because of a new chess achievement, but because of what he did in the
FPL. The chess grandmaster was currently sitting at the top of the Fantasy Premier League table.
And even for a man who had conquered the world of chess,
it was an incredibly big deal to be top of the FPL table midseason. So, he rushed to
twitter and updated his bio, following up with a tweet in case you didn’t notice the update.
His tweet said “bio needed an update”,
and attached was a screenshot of his profile. The bio read:
“World Chess Champion. The highest ranked chess player in the world.
Current (live) number 1 Fantasy Premier League player.”
What a flex, right?
He could not wait until the end of the season to brag about his achievement, and you know what?
He was right not to do so, as he ended up not finishing the season at the top of the table.
But like we said, FPL is more about bragging rights than anything else,
and that is why his midseason achievement is still on his bio. He just changed “current (live) number
1 Fantasy Premier League player” to “former (live) number 1 Fantasy Premier League player”.
We totally get Magnus, though. If we were number 1 even if it was just for once on the
first matchday of the season, we would climb to the rooftops and tell everyone about it.
Number 1 in a league of close to 10 million? Man, that’s one hell of an achievement.
But we know how very difficult it is to become number 1 in the world, so we have decided to
create a separate FPL league open to all Goal 90 subscribers. And guess what! If you are number 1
in the league at the end of the season, you win a brand new Playstation 5! Amazing, isn’t it?
If you’ve never finished top 3 in FPL worldwide, here’s your chance to still
win something while playing FPL as you compete within a smaller group. Also,
if you’ve never played FPL before, now is the time to start, you just might get beginner’s luck.
The link to join the league is in the description. Click on it and come and
battle with your fellow Goal 90 lovers and subscribers. Let’s get into manager mode!
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