Next season?

Congratulations once again to Crowninthians FC on winning the title for the third time running, excellent achievement and each one thoroughly deserved.

The Crown’s dominance, and the dwindling numbers towards the end of this year’s competition, have both in part led to the birth of this idea for next year’s league. This is merely an idea we are presenting to everyone and there is a poll below for you to have your say on what you would prefer. If nobody likes it, we’ll just go as normal.

The idea

Ok, so since the Crown are finding it so easy to win each year, and there are noticeable gaps between some of the other teams too, the league is maybe not as competitive as we would like and we have this idea to try and make it more competitive.

The idea is to have a number of people as player/managers who are responsible for their team – much like now – but who will pick their squad using a player draft (NFL fans get excited) instead of how they currently do. This way, each manager will take it in turn to make a pick to build up their squad from all the available players. This should make all of the teams more evenly matched and make for better competition – unless someone’s a really bad manager 😉

So, initially we’d need a number of people to register interest in running a team and then we will draw names from a hat to determine who becomes the player/managers. After that we’ll start getting all the interested players registered with their preferred position stated so we can build a database of players for the draft.

The number of players who register will determine how many teams we have, but it would be either 6 or 8.

The draft

We would host a draft day – probably down the Celtic hall – where we’ll have the player/managers on stage to conduct the draft. A predetermined order will see each manager pick one player each at a time to fill up their squad. Everyone will be welcome to come and join in, have a piss up and laugh/cry/jeer at the manager’s choices. Picture the scene: 100 boys having a drink, enjoying the draft and a lot of banter thrown in.

We understand some may have fears of not getting drafted, but nobody is going to miss out – in fact you could be in a position of power!

What we propose is to have the managers pick 9 players for their squad during the draft, and then any undrafted players will be pulled out of a hat and be able to choose which team they want to join until each squad is full (around 18 as usual).

By the end we should have 6 or 8 very evenly matched teams ready to do battle.

Pros and Cons

As with everything there are pros and cons, here are some we can think of initially:

Pros

  • More evenly matched teams making for better games and overall competition
  • Allows individuals who can’t raise a full team to enter the league
  • Better turn out as everyone has registered to play so should be committed
  • Full squads for every team
  • Make new friends by playing with new people
  • Managers can still draft their mates (if still available)

Cons

  • Might not have all your pals in one team
  • Unfair to break up Crowninthians?

Vote

Please cast your vote in the poll as we need as much feedback as possible, the last thing we want to do is piss off the loyal teams of the last 3 years. You can also leave any comments below using your FB account if you have any suggestions etc.

Thanks for reading.