As a sideline/alternative to our usual yearly Fantasy Football charade, not at all being suggested because I always lose focus after a couple of weeks an inevitably finish close to bottom of the table, I wondered if anyone might be interested in taking part in an all-new, all-American style draft league? Given it's now an option on the official Fantasy Football site.

How does it work?

Similar to your standard FPL, Fantasy managers also pick a 15-man squad in Draft. But there is one big difference. Each player can be owned by only one manager in each mini-league. So only one manager in your mini-league can have Mohamed Salah, only one can select Kevin De Bruyne. Only Cinty will pick any players from Southampton, etc. 

There's no budget limit, meaning you aren't going to be stuck deciding how to spend your last 0.5m when you need both a decent CB and a powerhouse striker. You have to hope that your pick isn't also on someone else's radar before you can nab them.

No falling behind on the table cos a rival remembered to triple-captain Salah that week while you forgot, no comedy as everyone rushes to sub out an inevitably-injured Pogba before the next gamesweek deadline. One player, one team, one glory (possibly). 

BUT WHAT ABOUT MA TRANSFERS???

You can trade players with other, er, players if you can reach an agreement. It's a bit like trading Pokemon cards, but instead of scamming a shiny Charizard for your counterfeit Magikarp, you're stuck trying to persuade Gonz that he should definitely give up his crummy old Dele Alli for your delightful Jesse Lingard. 

There's also some thing about 'waivers' and swapping for free agents that's too boring to go into here, but you can read about in the handy rules bit of the site. 

I'm interested, what's the catch?

Ideally, we all have to sit and do the actual draft at the same time, which means setting aside an hour or whatever where we're all at our respective computers as we wind through selecting 15 players each. Pain in the arse, but for a community of people who regularly schedule things like FNF hopefully it'll come naturally to us. 

But fear not: before the draft takes place you can create a priority watchlist of players. This list can help quickly identify potential picks during the draft, and will also be used to automatically draft a player if you aren't available to participate in the draft itself. Piece of piss.

There's more info and a helpful short video on the actual site here. 

---

I've gone to the trouble of tentatively starting a league: The glorious B&B Drafthouse, which you can join with league code: rsoipd. 

Obviously the more people involved (up to a max of 16) the better this will be, otherwise it's just me and Dino squabbling over Harry Kane for several months. An ugly sight. 

If anyone is actually keen then join the league and we can maybe set a time for a draft. Since I had to include a time in order to actually make the league I set it as 8pm this coming Friday, but can easily change it. Might be short notice ahead of the actual matches starting this weekend, but people can let me know what they think.

Boy this was a good way to kill 30 mins I should have spent working.