About Footie Blackjack

What's it all about?

Fantasy football is brilliant but it is also a part-time job. Squads, transfers, price changes, captaincy, chips, double gameweeks, team news breaking an hour before the deadline. Plenty of people love that. Plenty of others quietly stop playing by October, not because they stopped enjoying football but because they stopped having time.

Footie Blackjack is the version for the second group. You pick four fixtures and try to land on eleven total goals without going over — nothing else to manage, nothing to keep on top of, no penalty for a week off beyond scoring nothing that week. It takes about a minute, and it gives you something to care about across a whole weekend of results.

The full rules are on how to play, and there's a page on how to think about picking to eleven if you want to take it more seriously than the format strictly requires.

The origins of the idea for the game

The weekly Premier League version of Footie Blackjack isn't the first version of this game. Since about 2012, I've been running a World Cup and European Championships variant of the game where you had to pick three teams you thought would score 21 total goals throughout the tournament.

I ran the entire game through a Google Sheet (yes, a Google Sheet) and it required a lot of admin. I was updating goal counts throughout the tournaments manually, which was painful. But the games always proved popular amongst friends and family so I ran them every two years. It was just a shame that it was finished by the end of the summer. So the idea of a season-long Premier League variant had taken seed.

It's meant to be sociable

The game works on your own, but it's much better with other people. You can follow other players and see how their week is going from your dashboard, and you can create a room — a private league with a share code — for any group you like. Everyone's picks become visible once most of the gameweek's fixtures are under way, so there's still a full weekend of watching somebody's fourth fixture ruin them.

One set of picks counts in every league you're in, which is the whole reason it stays low effort no matter how many groups you join.

Who makes it

Footie Blackjack is built and run by Richard Easton, in the UK. It's one person's side project rather than a company, which is why it looks the way it does and why new things appear at the pace they do.

If something's broken, confusing, or you've got an idea that would make it better, email richard.easton@footieblackjack.co.uk. Messages get read by the person who can actually change the thing you're writing about.

Where the football data comes from

Fixtures, kickoff times and scores come from football-data.org. Scores update automatically while matches are being played, and each player's total is settled once all four of their chosen matches have finished.

Team form on the pick screen — the goals each side has scored in their last three games — comes from the same source, calculated across the current season's completed matches.

Not affiliated with the Premier League

Footie Blackjack is an independent game. It isn't connected to, endorsed by or licensed by the Premier League, any club, or any broadcaster. Club names are used only to identify fixtures.

How it stays free

There are no purchases, no premium tier and nothing behind a paywall. Costs are covered by advertising, by sponsors, and by people who buy the site a coffee. If you'd like to sponsor a gameweek or advertise, the details are on advertising and sponsorship.

What we store about you and what other players can see is set out plainly on privacy and cookies. The short version: your display name and your picks are public, your email address never is.