Soccer
A number six in Kathmandu, the Premier League from Gettysburg.
Futsal is how my friends and I saw each other growing up in Kathmandu: weeknight games on rented courts, organized in a group chat. Booking those courts was annoying enough that I eventually built khel-arena around the problem.
I play the six. It is the least glamorous job on the pitch and it is the one I want: sit in front of the back four, take the ball under pressure, and move it on to whoever has more room than you do. Nothing about it is flashy, and all of it is fundamental. The whole ask of the position is that the middle of the pitch stays neat and tidy while you are the one standing in it, and I would rather do that properly than score.
In Gettysburg it's pickup games when the weather allows and Premier League on the weekends. Playing did not survive the move as well as watching did, which is something I'm actively fixing.
The watching turned into Fantasy Premier League, which is a weekly exercise in decision-making under uncertainty with a hard deadline: fifteen players on a budget, one free transfer, prices moving overnight. I treat it as a small data problem, which is either the right way to play it or an elaborate excuse for the spreadsheet.
Two things in my projects came out of that. fpl-league is a live dashboard for the mini-league I play in, because the official app answers almost none of the questions people actually ask each other on a Saturday. world-cup-fantasy is the same instinct pointed at a tournament: my four-manager league kept arguing about who was really winning, so I built the thing that keeps receipts.
