Clubbing together with Fantasy Club Cricket

A fantasy cricket league in which you pick an XI from your own club's players

Fantasy leagues have changed the way we take interest in sports. Even a neutral can get excited about a match if they are relying on a particular player to perform well and secure valuable points. Now imagine how exciting fantasy sports would be if the players you could pick were also your team-mates.

Matt Heppell came up with the idea while playing for East Grinstead CC in Sussex. His idea was to apply the same principle of fantasy football to local cricket clubs.

You select your team each week out of a pool of players from your own club, while trying to stay within the set budget. Teams can include players from the 1st XI all the way down to the 4th XI, and those picked receive points based on their performance. The user with the most points at the end of the season wins – simple!

"It creates banter and talking points in the bar after games because suddenly you have people in the 1st XI taking an interest in how players in the 4th XI did that weekend. It really helps bring a club together." Heppell explained.

But how are players valued? "Valuing players is a really tricky thing because you are at risk of offending people if you value them lower than what they think they are worth. We leave player valuing up to the club administrator because they know the players best.

"But we do have a feature that will automatically increase or decrease a player’s value throughout the season based on performance, which adds an extra dimension when it comes to making transfers."

One significant feature of Fantasy Club Cricket is that participating clubs have a huge amount of freedom in how they use the tool.

"I wanted to create something that would cater for everyone. The club administrator has the power to change the look of their page, they can upload their club crest and add social media links. They can also customise the gameplay, such as when to open or close transfer windows or whether users can change their captain."

Once clubs have set up their league, everything else is taken care of. "The biggest compliment we get is for our integration with Play-Cricket. We have a direct link with their database so we can extract player profiles and scorecards and update the fantasy
leagues overnight. This is great because once a league is up and running the points update themselves week on week."

Heppell identifies two main benefits of Fantasy Club Cricket. "The first is the team spirit building, bringing clubs closer together by creating talking points and shared interests. The second is the fundraising. Clubs can charge however much they want for each person to enter, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility to have 50 teams enter a league. If they have all paid £10 that’s £500 for your club.

"The combined value of entry fees that I handled last year was £21,000, while many clubs collect entry fees themselves so the total raised will be far bigger. I’m really proud that something I created has put that much money into club cricket all around the UK which can be used on facilities or youth cricket. If we can continue to improve year on year, in 10 years’ time that figure will be huge."

For more information visit www.fantasyclubcricket.co.uk. Enter the code 'CRICKETER20' when signing up for a 20% discount