Fantasy Bundesliga is a private fantasy soccer manager game for Bundesliga. Around 2018 a friend and me grew tired from the likes of Comunio & Co. while at the same time discovering NFL Fantasy managers. By developing Fantasy Bundesliga we tried to translate the game mode of NFL Fantasy to the Bundesliga world. At first with an impromptu Google sheets + Web Crawler solution. By the 2020 we left Google sheets behind us and switched over to this small website project.
Fantasy Bundesliga contains most features known from regular NFL fantasy managers. Starting from a live draft, transfer system with waivers and trades, near-realtime scoring up to extensive player statistics.
Examples:
| Formation page | Home page |
|---|---|
 |
 |
List of features:
- Live draft with 10-12 users.
- Each season features a league mode and a cup mode.
- Head-to-head between users each round counting towards league standings or cup progress.
- Near-realtime scoring for each fixture and each round.
- Transfer system with waivers, trades and free agency.
- Extensive stats that users can harness to research player statistics and optimize user performance (e.g. which player attempts the most crosses? Is attempting tacklings or completing passes more important for a good fantasy performance?).
- Player projections for the upcoming fixture.
- Player and Bundesliga news to keep users informed within the website (e.g. real world injuries or transfers).
The frontend is a - I suppose - typical website frontend (HTML + CSS + JavaScript + PHP). Heart of the backend is a small MySQL Database.
The database is fueld by a number of Python ETLs. These external data-pipelines are essentially 1.) live scoring data pulled from a data providers API (see /data-pipelines/sm_player_stats.py), 2.) daily updates on dimension tables data pulled from the same data providers API (see /data-pipelines/sm_dim_table_update.py) and 3.) daily Bundesliga news updates collected by web scraping (see /data-pipelines/soccer-news-crawler.py).
In addition to the external data-pipelines two types of internal data-pipelines are in use: Firstly after each Bundesliga round data is reaggregated to calculate standings and statisitics (see /data-pipelines/spieltag-abschluss.php) and scripts. Secondly a number of scripts and jobs triggerd by user interaction (see /php/jobs/).
Architecture sketch:
