How it works

From the dashboard: name the auction and write the team names, from two to thirty two. Then the rules, which hold for the whole evening: starting credits, minimum raise, countdown seconds and how the squad is made up.

On creation each team gets a personal link. The link is the key: whoever holds it plays that team, so links go out privately, one by one, never all in the same chat.

If a link ends up in the wrong place you regenerate it from the desk: a new one is born and the old one stops working instantly, sessions included.

From the Listone page you import the Fantacalcio.it CSV exactly as it comes. Columns are found by their heading and not by position, so the Leghe exports and hand tidied sheets work too; Mantra roles fold back into the classic four.

You need at least as many players as it takes to fill every squad: slots per team multiplied by the number of teams.

The listone is split into two lists and every player sits in one of them. The urna holds the big names, the ones worth putting up even if nobody asked for them: that is what the auctioneer draws from. Chiamata holds all the rest, which goes up for auction only when somebody asks for it by name.

They move between the lists in bulk too, by price threshold. When the urna empties the system says so: the big names are gone, on to chiamata. The auction does not close by itself.

1. 1The auctioneer draws from the urna or looks a player up by name.
2. 2The countdown starts. Every buzz raises the bid by the minimum and restarts the clock from the top.
3. 3If nobody raises, time runs out and the lot goes to whoever buzzed last: credits deducted, player in the squad, a line in the history.

The countdown is the same for everyone: each phone corrects the drift between its own clock and the server, so nobody sees two seconds more or less.

You sold too fast. From the desk you undo the last award: the credits come back, the player goes back on the board.

Two buzzes in the same instant. They become two distinct raises, one after the other. No bid swallows the other and a player never ends up in two squads.

The connection drops. The state of the auction lives on the server, not on the phones: you reopen the link and start again from the exact point you were at. Not even the countdown depends on somebody browser.

A phone and a connection. No application to install, no account to create: the personal link is enough, and it works from any network.

The server decides the time, not the phone of whoever is raising. Every device measures the drift between its own clock and the desk and corrects it, so everyone sees the same second. A slower line is not a handicap, and nobody can claim they buzzed in time when the countdown had already run out: the server works out the award.

The state of the auction lives on the server, not in the browser. The phone dies, the wifi cuts out, you close the tab by mistake: reopen the link and you are exactly where you were, with your credits and your squad. The auction has carried on for everybody else in the meantime.

The desk handles the mechanics of the auction, not the company. Almost everyone keeps a video call open alongside (Meet, Zoom, Discord, whatever you already use) to comment and take the mickey. There is no need to integrate it: they are two separate things and they work better that way.

In January the squad is touched up without doing it all again: the auction reopens, each team releases its own footballers up to a cap the auctioneer sets, and those go back on the market for everybody. It applies from a matchday onwards, so the one under way is left alone.

Classic: you build the squad once and keep it until May, as you would after an auction. Then each gameweek you pick the eleven to field.

Free: you can rebuild the squad from scratch every gameweek, as long as it fits the credits. If you do not touch it, last week is what stands and you need do nothing. It is the mode for whoever wants to follow the market all season instead of living with a choice made in August.

Head to head: every gameweek you face an opponent, three points for a win, like fantacalcio has always been. The calendar is written when you start, so entries close there.

: the fantapunti of every gameweek are added up and whoever has most wins. No calendar is needed, so it takes any number of entrants and, above all, you can join after the season has started: for the gameweeks you missed you take the league average, so arriving late is not a handicap.

Whoever opens the league chooses: doors open to anyone who finds it, or every request goes through their approval. Anyone waiting can already build their squad, so when they are let in they are ready to play and have lost no time.

An empty table explains nothing, so our leagues are born already inhabited. The bot teams buy their squad on the same budget as everyone, field a lineup every matchday and take the same ratings: they are not fake rows put there to make up the numbers.

The ones standing in as opponents on a first matchday are another matter: they are scenery, they stay out of the table, and they are recycled for whoever arrives next.

From the list of leagues, with an account and a ticket: a ticket is good for one championship, and the first one is a gift the first time you try to enter.

Open leagues

Some of them are ranked: there the table is not a column of fantasy points, it is the tier ladder, and every matchday moves you up or down. It is how you measure yourself against people playing at your level, rather than against whoever got lucky at the auction.

The traguardo shows up on the board the moment it happens, with the room watching: you win your first player and there is your «First blood», you fill the last slot and «Full squad» goes off. Playing without an account costs nothing: the traguardi stay attached to the team and arrive all at once the day it is linked.

Inside a league you can switch on the Rainbow modifiers: twelve objectives that give points for how you played the gameweek, not for how much you spent at the auction. Keeping a clean sheet, taking no card, having a defender, a midfielder and a forward all score on the same Sunday, seeing a goal from someone who cost five credits.

They switch on one by one, and whoever leaves them all off plays the way it has always been played: the ratings and nothing else. They exist to give something to chase to whoever had a bad auction, who would otherwise have nothing left to play for by November.

Every league has a board of its own, the living room of its members: whoever has been admitted writes on it, and a message can be reported. It is where a league takes the mickey out of itself between matchdays, without needing a group chat somewhere else.

You pick them from the traguardi you have earned and the bands you have reached in ranked. We put the first three on for you as they arrive; from the fourth on you decide who gives up the place. The slots still free stay drawn empty on your card: they are the short list of what there is to win.

You pick the club you support from the competition you follow, from Serie A to the Premier League to the Champions, and its crest stays on the card next to the badges. In the game it counts for nothing: your squad is still the one you bought at the auction. It is how you introduce yourself, like a scarf.

It is the green ring around your picture, and it rises by playing: joining a league, fielding your eleven, coming back the next day. Every new level pays out Rainbow credits, ten times its own number.

Outside the leagues you can add each other as friends, write in private, and be told when something concerning you happens: your lineup filed, an achievement, a message. Notifications are read in here, and whoever wants them gets them by email too.

Every matchday you sit in a room with seven other teams at your height, and only how you finish in there counts. The first goes up and the last goes down, with two exceptions: in silver the top two go up, in diamond the last two go down. Nobody drops from silver back to bronze.

A tier that is harder to hold than to reach is the only kind worth holding: the higher you climb, the narrower the margin.

A seat nobody holds is taken by a lifebuoy, which finishes last and cannot be relegated. Rooms are drawn with at most one lifebuoy when the numbers allow it, and two are tolerated. From three up the room is a limbo lobby: nobody goes up and nobody goes down, and whoever sat in it is the first seated in a real lobby the next matchday.

The first room holds three: you and two of our teams, and whoever finishes first walks through. Nobody arrives here having beaten anyone, and a debut against seven others would be a measurement taken before the game.

At the top there is no next step and no way down: you play for the points of a table of its own, the one for those who made it.

At the end of the season it starts again, and the highest tier you reached stays: it becomes a badge to wear beside your team name. The reset is what gives the next season a meaning, and the badge is what makes the reset bearable.

By playing, and only by playing. Every traguardo is worth ten to five hundred of them, every profile level pays out ten times its own number, and joining a Rainbow league is worth a pack. There is no way to buy them with money, and that is not an oversight: it is the rule that keeps all this a game.

The first thing credits buy is packs: fifty credits, three cards, and no rare is guaranteed. You choose the set to draw from, so the collection grows on the side you care about. The collection is split into sets, and each set into three rarities: common, rare, legendary. The first is about the rituals of the auction, from the crumpled listone to the night before; the second goes on an away day, to the tables of the league’s cities.

The cards cannot be bought with money and cannot be traded: they are won by playing, and only that. The collection is the story of your career, not a market.

The other thing they buy is the profile card: frames around your picture and backgrounds behind it, bought with credits and worn whenever you like, one at a time. They show on your profile card, the same one that carries your badges and your club.

The ones tied to a traguardo or to a band stay out of the shop. The laurel of whoever won a league cannot be bought: if it could be, it would stop saying what it says.

We work out every footballer price ourselves, competition by competition, and from there it moves matchday by matchday on a table of bands: the dearer a player is, the harder it is to rise and the easier to fall. Every footballer has a page of his own, with the history of what he has been worth.

See the prices

The calendar is the real one, and the lineup deadline comes out of it: the first kick-off of the matchday. While the games are on, the match pages refresh themselves.

Open the calendar

Bonuses, penalties, rating bands and the clean sheet: the two rule sets the game is played on are written out value by value, so a league can argue about a rule while looking at it rather than remembering it.

Read the rule sets

The news covers what happens in the competitions with our prices inside it, so a story also says what changes for your squad. The glossary explains the words of fantasy football, one per page, for whoever meets them for the first time.

Read the newsOpen the glossary

Playing does not ask for it: squads, line-ups, the table and the rank are free. Premium costs €0.99 a month and is for whoever wants the extra tools: the line-up advice, the automatic line-up when you forget, the news of the clubs you follow and no banner in the Rainbow leagues. It touches no points, no tables and no prices.

All the prices