What do you get when you combine football stickers, the markets and fantasy football? Footstock is what you get, and it might just be a gamechanger.

Footstock is a platform where player trading meets fantasy football. Players are able to buy and sell their favourite footballers on the market and also build teams to compete in regular competitions against other Footstock players, with huge cash prizes up for grabs.

As someone who likes the odd flutter at the weekend, is obsessed with fantasy football and used to passionately collect football stickers, this is the ultimate platform that I cannot resist giving a go.

With £150 to spend and my eye on winning the New User GW18 Contest, I set to work in building a portfolio of players capable of winning me some cash.

Firstly, I buy some packs. There are three types of packs available. EPL Standard, EPL Premium and EPL Exclusive. The first two have five players in and the exclusive one comes with 10. I opt for two standard packs and three premiums.

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Opening packs is arguably the most exciting thing about the whole Footstock experience. It’s much like opening up a pack of football stickers, but virtually. The suspense is real as each player is revealed, one by one.

I pack several youth and fringe players in the Standard packs, but I also pack the likes of Danny Welbeck, John Egan, Bernard, Seamus Coleman and Xherdan Shaqiri. Not a bad bunch of names who do play and will be able to bring some points scoring to my squad. More on that in a bit.

The Premium Packs are where it’s at for me, though. Each cost £29.99 and only one pack gave me a bunch of players with a combined worth of less than what I paid. The others gave me a small profit, with the likes of Trent Alexander-Arnold (worth £23.10), Timo Werner (£19.75), Riyad Mahrez (£7.97) and James Maddison (£6.95) all packed.

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Each player has a specific value, based on the open market, as well as a rating out of five stars. The star ratings are incredibly important when it comes to entering contests and assembling the best possible squad capable of winning you some cash. The contest I have my eye on to begin with involves picking a squad of six players with a combined total of 11 stars.

Now to the open market, where you can buy and sell players. With plenty of money left in the bank, I bought Heung-min Son (£20.81), Alexandre Lacazette (£4.09), Ruben Dias (£4.66), Paul Pogba (£4.60) and a handful of other players, all with varying star ratings. I won’t be able to use them all for this contest, but they’ll come in handy eventually because player cards don't expire. Once you own them, you own them forever and can use them over and over again in contests.

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The key thing to remember, which I found out very quickly, is you can’t have the same player in your team across multiple contests or contest entries at any one time if you only own one of them. Therefore, if I wanted to enter two different contests and play Son in both of them I would need to own two of his cards, which means a financial outlay of over £40. You can own a maximum of 200 cards of the same player at any one time.

This makes things a lot more challenging and adds a tactical element to building a collection of cards/players that you can utilise across multiple contests and to boost your chances of winning some money.

The contests work very similarly to normal fantasy football and they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are free to enter, some involve a fee to be at the table, but all work off the same scoring methods. Players earn fantasy points for things like goals, passes, assists, tackles, minutes played, etc. But they can also lose points for things like offsides, fouls committed, cards, goals against, etc.

For me, the best thing about the prize pool for contests is that it’s tiered. All contests will have a different payout structure but it effectively means you don’t necessarily have to beat everyone in that contest in order to win a cash payout.

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For example, in the free to enter New User GW18 Contest I’m in, which has a £200 prize pool, the winner will take home £42, 2nd wins £30, 3rd takes home £22, and then everyone who finishes below that down to 15th can also win. If you finish 15th, you win £4. This doesn’t sound like a lot but it almost pays me back for what I paid for Pogba. Not bad for a free to enter contest. There are 75 people in the league and after two days I’m 14th with 92.20 points, with just Eberechi Eze left to play. It’s touch and go whether I finish in a cash prize position now but fingers crossed Eze has the game of his life at the Emirates.

There is so much more to Footstock that you eventually work out for yourself when exploring the platform. I learned the hard way that each contest has different squad entry rules, which meant I had to go back to the market and buy players that fit the entry criteria and would have a chance of scoring me some good points before building a squad that fit the rules.

There is an element of skill involved and, of course, spending your own money on a decent and profitable collection of players can be both expensive and a challenge. But that’s the beauty of a product that combines fantasy football, gambling and trading. There is always a risk involved and you might not always get back what you put in, but with a bit of knowledge, research and a strategy, Footstock can be a very rewarding platform for anyone who enjoys doing all three of the above.

Footstock has won me over, I just hope I win my first contest. An Eberechi Eze hat-trick against Arsenal should do it…

Sign up to Footstock now and get 50% of your first deposit back as contest credit up to the value of £50!