Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Games and Scraggly Dog Games are proud to announce that the Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football app is now available to download for free on iOS devices in time for the return of the UK Premier League after the international break. This free Fantasy Football app gives game users the opportunity to manage their favourite club and make substitutions during the live match. The game scores their decisions and pits their decision making skills against the real-life manager, as well as friends and family. The game also generates real-time “fanalytics” data on what fans are thinking about the live match (most popular lineups, bench, formations, substitutions, etc.) which is available for licensing to broadcasters and other sports media outlets.
This is the first fantasy football game to allow real-time management of a football club by choosing a formation, lineup and bench (similar to playing “Chamionship manager”, but using live data). It is also the first game to let players make live, in-match substitutions. The game uses an advanced statistical scoring method, based on “moneyball” principles, that identify the key performance metrics from over 100 key performance metrics licensed from Opta (distance covered, passes completed, shots on target, etc.) that are important in determining good (and bad!) player performance. This scoring method is also capable of predicting the likely performance of a player in an upcoming match, which gets around the game logic problem of scoring players who don’t play in real life. In testing during the last season, the game predicted real footballers performance to within a 4% margin of error over the full season. This allows it to predict performance data for players, even if they sat on the bench during the match.
Combining this innovative scoring method and novel gameplay with match day player performance data licensed from Opta, the game creates a unique per-player score and allows User’s to pit their skills against their real-life Manager, as well as against each other. Unlike other fantasy football leagues, new game users won’t be penalised for joining late – whenever you join, you get the same points that the real-life manager has accumulated, so you are instantly competing with him. The game track’s your performance over the full season so you can see how your Club would have fared if you were the Manager. Game users will also be able to set up Private leagues among family, friends, local pub, school or workplace and go head-to-head across the season. Following a very successful August launch on Android, Premier League football fans across the world can download Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football on iTunes.
The game also creates a wealth of real-time anonymised and aggregated “big-data fanalytics”, which is available to sports broadcasters and media, betting companies, clubs/franchises, sporting associations and sports portals via a dashboard display, which can be fed into broadcasts, reporting and newsfeeds in close to real-time.
Launching the iOS version, Dr. Padraig Doolan said “The initial launch has been really successful, we’ve already had over a thousand football fans from across the world challenging all twenty managers. The game data we are receiving is phenomenal and some of the results on how people rate particular football stars has been really surprising”. When asked about some of the data from the first month of the season, he said “Manchester United is the most popular club so far, 35% of players chose 4-3-3, 32% picked 4-4-2 and Stephen Gerrard is Liverpool’s most popular player, being selected on average by over 90% of fans”.
Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football is available now in iTunes and Google Play.