Premier League

It's just a bit of fun... until the key part of the official Fantasy Premier League site crashes for the best part of Friday evening and Saturday morning.

The most expensive league in the world attracts more than two million people to the biggest fantasy football site in the world.

Unfortunately when all two million participants try to access the site in the crucial hours before the 2011-12 season it's more than one site can take.

Last minute team selections and transfers proved almost impossible. As a result many ardent fans are heading into this week's games either unsure who they've got in their team for Game Week 1 or, worse, with a less than ideal squad.

We take our fun seriously here at JOE.ie so we're seriously miffed that more than one of us has had to rely on the 'auto complete' function to make our team selection.

And then there are those who left it to the last minute (e.g. the person writing this story) to get a team together, some of whom will go into the new Premier League season like Avram Grant... teamless.

One of the JOE.ie team (yes, me again) set their alarm for 6am on Saturday morning in the hope that the site would be back up and wouldn't be so busy that it would crash again.

I was successful, having written everything down the night before so that I could be in and out in ten minutes. An attempt to perform a last-minute transfer at just before 9am, however, proved a task too far.

Understandably Twitter was alight with frantic comments from the many people frozen out, causing @OptaJoke to post the following stats-based tweet.

"91,122 - Number of people panicking because the official Fantasy Football website has not been working for the past few hours. Tinker."

Nick Bradshaw

[Update at 6pm on Saturday 13/8/11: areas where you need to sign in are still resulting in 'server error' messages being posted.]