About Retro Fantasy Football
Retro Fantasy Football is a free nostalgia game. Pick a Premier League season from 1995/96 onwards, build a £100m fantasy squad from that season's real players, and play all 38 gameweeks to see how many points your XI can score.
How it works
Every season is our best attempt at replaying history. You draft from the players who were really there, and the season unfolds as closely as the records allow: the real fixtures, the real results, the real double gameweeks when matches were postponed, and players scoring the way they really scored. You get one free transfer a week, banked up to five, plus a January wildcard to keep your score climbing, and your final total goes on a global leaderboard.
How close to history is it?
From 2016/17 onwards, it's the real thing. Every player earns points from their actual matches, gameweek by gameweek: their real goals, assists, clean sheets, saves, cards and bonus, with the injuries, bans and dropped players that really happened.
Before 2016/17, it's as close as the records get. Every fixture and final score is real, so every result and clean sheet is what happened. Match-by-match player records from that era aren't freely available, so who played, scored and assisted in each match is worked out from each player's real season: a striker who scored 30 that year will score around 30 for you, but not necessarily in the same games. From 2000/01, saves and bookings follow each match's real statistics too.
Where the data comes from
Player names, clubs, positions and season records come from public historical sources, and fixtures and results from a public football results archive. Seasons from 2016/17 use each player's real match-by-match record from a public fantasy football archive. Everything is scored with this game's own points rules, and fantasy prices are modelled to resemble a real fantasy game (from 2016/17 they're based on the real ones). Points are lightly scaled so every season counts the same on the leaderboard.