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Fantasy Sports Media Guide: The Copa de Boro Ledger
One common thread of many of my writing projects is that I track some sort of behavior in a spreadsheet, then find a story in the numbers I’ve collected.
 
This fondness for data journalism probably stems from a lifelong love of sports—my favorite reading material as a child was college football season preview guides (especially the numbers-rich Phil Steele magazines), and long road trips in the back of my parents’ mini-van were spent filling notebooks with fictional stats from players and teams that existed only in my head.
 
I briefly scratched this itch professionally (well, if internships count) as I pursued a career in pro sports, writing blurbs for an NHL team’s gameday program and mining statistical trends for Major League’s Soccer weekly media member newsletter.
 
Although I left sports many years ago, the innate need to track, analyze, and derive narrative from data has stuck around. To satisfy this compulsion, several years ago I started logging my friends’ performance in our long-running (est. 2011) Fantasy Premier League league.
 
This began as a simple spreadsheet, and has since grown into a 27-page (and counting) PDF that captures every player’s season-by-season performance, league scoring trends, who would win if we used F1’s scoring system (because why not), and more. Sprinkled in throughout is also plenty of snark and inside jokes.
In addition to the copy, the interior layout is all done by me in Canva. I hire a designer to do the cover, which features the likeness of our recently crowned champion as well as our actual traveling trophy—the Copa de Boro—on an old Sports Illustrated issue.  
 
Truthfully, I get more out of updating and adding to the guide each year than I do playing the actual game anymore (though knowing that any poor performance is going to be recorded forever is often motivation enough to at least set a quick lineup each week). Everyone else in the league also seems to enjoy Guide Release Day, and several times it’s been handy to reference during the season to see if a particular feat had been accomplished before.
 
There’s also some sentimentality at play. My friends and I started this league when we were in our early twenties, and many of us have since moved away to other states and countries. The league offers one last remaining point of mutual contact for many of us, and the guide a yearbook to help remember some moments captured within the data:
 
Taylor winning back-to-back championships to me is the story of the time he spent $30 to mail the trophy from Hawaii to Florida, as we are the only fantasy league where a failed title defense means you have to pay money. Having to change every mention of Makenzi S. to Makenzi E. marked the occasion of our first intra-league marriage, and my own victories remind me of exactly where I was in a particular season of my life. Case in point, the 2023/24 guide shed several pages in an effort to save time and energy following the birth of our son.
 
Future guides will probably continue to thin out, but at the very least I expect to always maintain a simple list of who proudly had a plastic trophy on their desk and during which time of their lives. And that’s the best explanation I can give for my urge to archive even the most trivial of activities: not just to capture who won and lost, but to try and preserve everything else going on at the same time. Some people scrapbook to preserve their memories, I apparently use spreadsheets. 
 
Click any of the covers at the top of the page to view that year’s edition.