Chess genius Magnus Carlsen - conqueror of Trent Alexander-Arnold - is now eyeing fantasy football glory

For those of us for whom dither and delay are the default, success at Fantasy Football will always be elusive. Making the right decision at the right time is a trait entirely absent from the skillset of us also rans.

For the serial incompetent at the game, just once managing to pick a side for the weekend without a goalkeeper who registers an own goal after the ball hits his back on its way into the net, or a defender who hobbles off injured after 15 minutes, or a striker with an apparent clinical fear of goalscoring, would represent the peak of achievement.

And my sense of cowed inadequacy at organisational prowess of others has hardly been improved by the news that one of those heading towards the bundle of glittering prizes on offer to this season’s winner of Fantasy Premier League (which includes a Nike manager’s coat) is a chess grandmaster. If that’s what it takes to win such booty, then the rest of us might as well give up now.

Like many of his fellow Norwegians, the chess genius Magnus Carlsen is obsessed by the Premier League. But this season he has put his obsession to the test, entering Fantasy Premier League, the biggest iteration of the fantasy game in the world. And after this weekend’s fixtures, he stands sixth in the table. That’s sixth out of more than six million players. This is a man who clearly knows when to replace his hapless centreback.

The connection between chess and football is not as unlikely as you might think. Last year, Carlsen played an exhibition match against Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold. The Premier League’s assist machine is a keen chess player, in the past wiling away the down time on European away trips by taking on Ben Woodburn, his fellow Melwood Academy graduate. Since Woodburn went out on loan to Oxford United, Alexander Arnold has taken to his computer for opposition.

Not that his enthusiasm did him much good when he was pitched against the grandmaster in Manchester last October: Carlsen delivered check mate within 19 moves. Still, whitewash as it may have been, he did considerably better than another of Carlsen’s celebrity opponents: Bill Gates was beaten in nine. And Alexander-Arnold’s England international predecessor Sol Campbell was even less successful when he played the British grandmaster Nigel Short in 2014 and had his king surrounded within moments of being introduced.

Alexander-Arnold is not alone among footballers in his insistence that chess helps his game. Jim Bentley, the AFC Fylde manager and former boss at Morecambe, is equally enthusiastic. A former junior chess champion, he reckons it assists players (and coaches) in the development of their tactical and strategic thinking, hones decision making and enhances the management of space. Plus, he reckons, nothing improves forward vision like chess, a game in which the ability to draw an opponent into a move in order to disrupt their defence is a key component of a player’s skillset.

Carlsen, though, isn’t using his chess skill to enhance his football (though he does like to indulge in some keepy-uppies before he takes to the board in competition). He is using it to succeed at Fantasy Football. And, while some of his decisions might be considered far-sighted - from the start of the season basing his defence around Sheffield United’s midfielder John Lundstram was a brilliant move - he admits the most important quality he has in the game is luck.

It was, for instance, sheer good fortune that saw him promote Wolves’s Leander Dendoncker from his fantasy bench for the first time in the very match in which he scored a goal and delivered a clean sheet, the perfect storm of fantasy points accumulation. For most of us incompetents, that would have been precisely the point at which we lost patience with the player and dropped him.

But even as he prepares to take possession of that prized track-coat, Carlsen has some way to go before he can preen himself on delivering the finest observation on the relationship between chess and football. That distinction belongs to the former Arsenal player (and verbal grandmaster) Lukas Podolski, who once reckoned: “Football is like chess. Only without the dice.”