Online auction
Your fantacalcio auction, online
Each of you at home, all on the same countdown. You call the players, the others bid from their phones, and the credits come off without anyone touching a spreadsheet.
When running it online is the better idea
The league is ten years old and the auction has always been held in someone’s living room. Then one of you moves for work, one works shifts, two have small children and do not go out after dinner. In August the poll goes round the group chat and the date that suits everybody does not exist.
There are two ways out: an auction with three proxies and half the league unhappy, or an auction online. The second one works, as long as you do not improvise it with a shared spreadsheet and a group call. Anyone who has tried knows how that ends: by the tenth player the credits do not add up, two people swear they bid first, and the «three, two, one» reaches each of them with a different delay.
What you need
One personal link per team
Whoever is organising creates the auction and sends each team its own address. That link is the credential: open it and you are in, with no sign up and no password to remember. If it lands in the wrong group chat you regenerate it, and the old one stops working instantly.
A browser, not an app
You play from the browser on your phone. There is nothing to download on auction night, which is the worst possible moment to ask ten people to install something.
A video call for the voices
The desk keeps the numbers, but a silent auction is a sad one. A group call open alongside is enough: it does not need to share any screen, it is only there so you can hear each other.
How the evening goes
Players come up for auction in two ways. The big names come out of the urna, drawn at random because sooner or later they have to come up anyway. Everyone else stays on chiamata and only comes up if somebody asks for them by name.
From there it is always the same loop: the lot opens, the countdown starts, every raise restarts it, and when it runs out the player goes to whoever raised last. Credits come off, the squad updates, and the board shows it to everyone at the same moment.
The server keeps the time. Every phone corrects its own clock drift, so the countdown you see is the real one, and a raise counts when it reaches the desk: there is no more arguing about who was first, because it is no longer a matter of opinion.
Half in the living room, half online
The most common case is not the league scattered everywhere: it is the one where six people meet at somebody’s house and three are elsewhere. It works the same. The board runs on a big screen in the living room, whoever is there bids from their own phone like everyone else, and whoever is connected sees the same thing at the same instant.
The one thing to watch is the sound: if the living room is talking and the remote players hear only silence, the auction becomes unfair before it becomes awkward. A phone in the middle of the table with the call open solves it.
Questions
- Does everyone need an account to run the auction online?
- No. The account is only for whoever organises. Everyone else gets a personal link and plays from there, with no sign up and nothing to install.
- How can you be sure the countdown is the same for everyone?
- The server keeps the time, not the phones. Every screen shows the same countdown corrected for its own clock drift, and a raise counts at the moment it reaches the desk, not the moment it leaves.
- Do you still need a video call?
- It is worth it. The desk keeps the numbers, but the teasing and the haggling are half the evening: a group call open alongside is enough, and it does not need to show anything.
- What if somebody loses connection mid raise?
- They reopen their link and find the auction exactly where it got to: the state is on the server, not on the phone. If the moment was decisive, the auctioneer can undo the last award and run the lot again.
- Can you do half in person and half remotely?
- Yes, and it is the most common case. Whoever is in the room watches the board on a big screen and bids from their own phone like everyone else: as far as the desk is concerned nothing changes.