Football Gambling For Wusses

You expect to see various World Cup fantasy football things but this one on BBC Sport is really strange. Apart from being hideously complicated, the main basis on which your picks score points is not for humdrum stuff like scoring goals and winning games, as the naive observer (like me) would think, oh no. Teams score points on the basis of how much press coverage they receive.

Yes, really. How many square centimetres of match report in various newspapers. I was utterly perplexed by this until it was explained to me this is usually done with celebrities in a sort of points for media coverage kind of way. After that I was only a little less perplexed. That makes a degree of sense because until the day when Celebrity Deathmatch becomes real instead of animation (and we all pray for that day to come), there's no other way of measuring how celebrities compete with each other.

In football though, we have these things called games where teams try to get the ball in the net against each other and the team who does it most wins. And it's all set up so that the teams who do this the best progress in what we call a "World Cup". This is all too bizarre. This compared to actually betting on football is like play money poker compared to the real thing. Without the money it just isn't the same. It all paints the picture of some fantasy football type nerd watching England beat Brazil 5-4 completely unmoved, then opening the paper next day, punching the air and shouting "Yes ! 14 column centimetres !"