“I knew that it would take over my life, but when everyone else is doing it, you think, ‘What will mark me out is that I will pay attention to it the whole year’,” says Lee, a video director who lives near Liverpool. “I will ruin a whole year of my life, whereas I know my mates won’t,” he adds, only half-joking.

I recognised in Lee a sense of having to prove my football knowledge to the world. “I’ve always had a massive interest in football,” Lee says. “I’m not really competitive unless it’s something I’m good at.”

And if you prove it one season, you need to repeat the trick the next to show that it wasn’t a fluke. So it goes on. As more players have poured into the game over the past 10 years, an industry of websites, podcasts and radio shows began to appear. Advice sites such as Fantasy Football Scout were making the research more accessible and acceptable.

“You’re like, ‘Oh, it looks like Craig is taking it seriously this year’,” Lee says. “So, you can’t let it drop. All the messages start, everyone’s second guessing each other and you can’t not do it. Until you really make a stand.”

Jon, a documentary producer from London, did make a stand. “I’ve been clean for two years,” he says, with a little irony. He started FF as a challenge to prove he could beat his stat-obsessed mate Clive. (Perhaps at this point, it’s worth noting that 96 per cent of the respondents that Nottingham Trent spoke to were male.)

“I’d be on holiday sneakily planning our day around where I might get a signal,” he says. “Or hiding in the loo so my wife didn’t know. ‘Are you doing Fantasy Football in there?’ ‘Er no!’ She’d say, ‘Oh it doesn’t matter if you miss a week.’ And I’d be like, ‘You don’t understand.’”

For Lee, the planning and strategising started pretty much as soon as the previous season ended. “I’ve always been a compulsive list-maker and so over the summer, my team would evolve,” he says. “Every time there was a signing, it might change. ‘OK, Dušan Tadić is coming in at Southampton, he might an interesting one.’

“Conversely, coming towards the end of the season run-in, I’d be planning five or six game weeks in advance,” he adds.

Then there was the weekly “work” of monitoring form and injuries. “It was sort of ‘reflect on your team on a Sunday/Monday, revisit on Friday and deploy on Saturday’,” he says. “It sounds so pathetic, I know now.”

I operated more of a last-minute approach to weekly team selection, partly due to personality, but also some weird idea that it gave me an advantage. In truth, it did nothing of the sort. In the days when the FF website wasn’t mobile friendly, I once found myself trying to register at Woking library with a golf bag on my back in order to submit my team before 11.30am.

On another shameful Saturday, I called my dad from Morocco to take him through a transfer involving Mr Daniel Sturridge. It’s difficult enough explaining it to a technology and football-phobic father if we were face to face. I was trying to take a Land Rover across a significant river while he was on speaker phone. My wife, rightly, had a look that conveyed equal parts astonishment and despair. In my defence, it was the penultimate weekend of the season and I had a lead to maintain.

And once our teams were in, that’s when the self-flagellation could really begin.

“We’d had a lovely day in Whitstable,” Lee remembers. “It was unseasonably warm, gorgeous. We were driving back home, and I stuck the radio on. It was Leicester at home to Burnley and I had Jamie Vardy as captain [captains score double points]. We were pootling along the motorway and Vardy misses a penalty. It completely changed my mood. My girlfriend’s like, ‘Do you want to go for a pint on the way back?’ and I was like, ‘No, I’ve got to listen to this now’, trying to will my team to perform better.”

Then there’s the dreaded “what if” of finding out that your unselected players had scored, or worse, scored several. I once witnessed the clash of fantasy regret in real life at Stamford Bridge after Mr Frank Lampard scored a penalty. Why did my friend Tim, a Chelsea fan, look devastated? He’d just swapped him out for Mr Steven Gerrard.

This was another of Fantasy Football’s pernicious side effects, to slowly and surely put you off watching football itself. The game I once enjoyed for its skill and drama was now just a medium for displaying my weekly mistakes.

“I was watching football like some kind of statistician, but like a really bad one,” says Jon. “Moneyball was a good film, but turns out when you’re doing it, it’s just not much fun.”

His moment of clarity came after what he calls “a rookie error”. “I did all my transfers thinking there was a game week, but it was an international break and a bunch of players got injured. Then my mate Clive got 120 points or something with Salah as triple Captain. And I was like, I’m out. I’m done.”

Lee can also point to a specific moment when he knew his fantasy days were over.

“We came back after the pandemic, and I made Kevin De Bruyne captain over Aubameyang on the mobile app,” he recalls. “I went out for a run and listened to the Arsenal match. Aubameyang did nothing and I was like, ‘Thank God’. I got home and the changes I’d made hadn’t gone through.” In Fantasy terms, it was a tragedy of epic proportions.

“When I was emailing Fantasy Football, writing a very serious, beautifully composed but angry email explaining what had happened, I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’”

My own withdrawal was less dramatic. After another disappointing week, I began to realise that I didn’t actually have to play this game at all. I could see the freedom on the other side of the fence. As soon as I made peace with the idea that this wasn’t my contractual duty as an adult male, I found out how to cancel my account with immediate effect.

A few weeks later, watching Premier League highlights was a revelation. For the first time in 15 years, I could watch a goal on its own terms rather than trying to work out who got the assist.

The words that I kept on hearing – and using – were “shackles” and “relief” and “having our weekends back”. “It’s sort of like when England failed to qualify for Euro 2008 and you could watch the football without having to think about when the next dreadful group game was on,” Lee says.

But there’s a need to stay vigilant. “My son has just got into football and I might be getting sucked back in,” says Jon. As a new season dawns, don’t rule out a Fantasy Football Managers Anonymous opening near you.