The commissioner's season-start checklist

Running a league is mostly one evening of decisions followed by nine months of not being able to change them. This is what to settle in that evening.

Agree the shape before you build

Who is playing, and how many? Six friends and a sixty-person public league are different games. A small league can afford eccentric scoring because everyone is in on the joke; a large one needs rules that read clearly to strangers.

How long? The gameweek range sets the cost — one credit per gameweek — and, more importantly, the commitment. A ten-gameweek league with strange rules gets more enthusiastic buy-in than a 38-gameweek one, and you can always run another.

Is there a prize? Not our business, but it changes behaviour. Leagues with stakes want tighter rules, fewer eccentricities, and a scoring system nobody can call unfair afterwards.

The decisions that lock

A league stays editable only until a member picks a squad or the first deadline approaches. After that, these are fixed for the season:

• Scoring rules — every rule, every value, every condition.
• Player prices — the whole market.
• Player pool — exclusions and per-club caps.
• Budget and transfer economy.

Everything else — name, description, whether it is public — stays editable.

So the checklist below is really “things to get right before anyone joins”.

Scoring

• Does the rule set match the sentence you started with?
• Have you double-counted any event? (Goals, shots on target and big chances all fire on the same moment.)
• Is there a position nobody would ever buy?
• Are the negatives proportionate to the positives?
• Do your conditions have sensible minimums — pass completion gated on attempts, milestones gated on minutes?

Prices

• Look at the priced list after your last scoring change. Prices are computed from your rules, so any rule edit moves the market.
• Is anyone obviously mispriced? Override them.
• Are new signings and promoted-club players sensible, or sitting at the default because they have no history here?
• Is the cheapest legal squad comfortably affordable, not marginally? (Publishing is blocked if it is impossible, but “barely possible” makes for a miserable squad-picking experience.)

Player pool

• Per-club cap set where you want it.
• Any club caps or exclusions agreed with the group rather than sprung on them.
• A legal fifteen is still comfortably buildable after exclusions.

Transfers

• Free transfers per gameweek, banking limit, and hit cost agreed.
• For a short league, consider being more generous — one free transfer a week matters much more across ten gameweeks than across thirty-eight.

Before you share the link

• Read the review step properly. It is the last point at which everything is cheap to change.
• Check the gameweek range starts when you think it does.
• Publish, then open the Rules tab and read it as a member would. If you cannot explain a rule from that page, your managers cannot either.

After you share it

• Send the rules link with the invite, not just the invite. The single most common cause of grumbling is someone picking a squad under assumptions from a different game.
• Set a reminder for the first deadline. Squads lock, and a manager with no squad scores nothing.
• Point people at the guide rather than answering the same three questions individually.

During the season

There is very little for you to do, which is the intent. Deadlines enforce themselves, scoring runs automatically, and standings update live.

The one thing worth doing: when somebody asks why a player scored what they scored, open the per-player breakdown rather than debating it. Every point traces back to a named rule and a raw statistic, including the rules that paid zero — the answer is almost always on screen.

Start your league, or read how to create one.