Want to crush a celebrity?

Your mates have been letting rip with an awful lot of ring talk when it comes to the football lately and deep down, you know they haven’t got a notion.

You have been forced to suffer their rubbish throughout every weekend piss up for a decade but now, you have figured out a way of earning a few shillings from their bravado-fuelled pronouncements. Step forward the fantasy football.

Convincing them to join a league at a tenner a man is the easy part – they’ll all dive in. The difficulty comes when they promise to pay you later and unfortunately, do nothing of the sort.

The true horror of the situation you find yourself in begins to dawn when some tool who knows more about Emerdale than football surges to the top. There are 20 people in the league at a tenner a man – so you as the league organiser now owe him €200.

“We had the exact same problem,” says Brian Kearney. “It gets embarrassing after a couple of weeks of looking for your 10 quid.” But rather than falling out with all his friends and being forced to go on the piss with his sister, Brian and his cohorts decided to set up ubecha.com – the world’s first social betworking site.

Kicking yourself

The idea is so simple you will be kicking yourself for not thinking of it first. “It allows you to come on and play games like fantasy football and match prediction games against your friends or other football fans.”

When you log on you can choose to join a public game and play against the general population, or set up a private game for just you and your mates. The public games are sponsored by the likes of Champion Sports and offer various prizes for winners, but the private games are where the site really comes into its own.

“The creators of these games can decide if they want to play for the craic or if they want to put a few quid on it,” explains Brian. “If you do put cash on a game ubecha.com acts as a bank. We hold the pot for the duration of the game and cash out to the winner at the end.”

Thus ending the season-long money hounding that has blighted so many friendships since fantasy football came into our lives. Whoever creates the league can even decide how they want the winnings dished out – a winner-takes-all or a first, second and third place carve up.

Rooting

For most of us, contact with celebrities is restricted to posting sycophantic comments on their Twitter page and rooting around in their bins. However, the latest addition to the ubecha.com site gives us the chance to actually compete against the great and the good.

The World Cup 2010 Fantasy Football Celeb Charity League has brought together a list of celebs that will be choosing fantasy teams from among the players at the World Cup and going up against each other in aid of Irish charity the Jack & Jill Foundation.

In return for a €5 donation, all of which goes to the Irish children’s charity, you can join the celeb mini-league.

While the celebs are playing for glory, us randomers are in with a chance of securing some pretty decent prizes. Marathon Sports Travel threw in flights, tickets and transfer to the first Man United Game of 2010/11 Barclay’s Premier League season for first place. Second place is tickets to Castlepalooza Music Festival and third is the new Ireland kit. Which you can wear during the games Ireland won’t be playing because of the French and their cheating ways.

Among the celebs already signed up by Ubecha, which is hoping to raise €10,000 for the Jack & Jill Foundation, are Tony Fenton, The Coronas, Actor Simon Delaney, Niall Breslin from the Blizzards, Ken Egan and a raft of presenters off MTV. Curiously, one of them, Laura Whitmore (pictured above), appears to be female.

 

 

Kenny Egan giving ’em hell

“Laura Whitmore knows a little bit about football, although I think she got a lot of help from Melvin and Ricky, her co-hosts on MTV,” says Brian. “She wanted to get on board even though she’s not a huge fan so we’re all rooting for her here at the office.” A girl in the fantasy football. How sweet!

So who does Brian reckon is going to come out on top? “My money is on Delaney. He seems to know what he’s at. He’s been talking tactics already and the game hasn’t even kicked off yet.”

Many of the celebs have been forced to work around their schedules when putting their teams together. “The Coronas are touring in Australia at the moment,” explains Brian. “Danny O’Reilly rang me from Melbourne last week. He had been picking the first draft of his team just before they jumped on stage.”

Kenny Egan meanwhile has been picking his team from the Ukraine. “He’s training there at the minute,” explains Brian. “He’s been picking his team between training in five and ten minute slots.”

This might be your only chance to beat an Olympian at something so log onto www.ubecha.com and make a name for yourself.