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Fantasy Football

Answered as per Shafi'i Fiqh by Qibla.com

Answered by Ustadha Shazia Ahmad

I have a couple of friends at the moment they are involved in a game called Fantasy Football where they all pick 11 football players each and they get points for the players individual performances and at the end of the month. Whoever has the most points is rewarded by the other friends, i.e. they give him 10 each. What they would like to know is if what they are doing is unlawful.

Answer:
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

In the name of Allah, the most Merciful, the most Compassionate.

It is permissible to play Fantasy Football unless there is money paid upfront, in which case it would be considered gambling; i.e. unlawful.

However, in our experience Fantasy football becomes, at times, unpleasant because it causes one to root for individual players instead of your team. For example, if you’re a Steelers fan and have Randel El on your team but not Hines Ward, you’ll be rooting for only Randel El to score a touchdown and actually against Hines Ward.

In any case, this is my advice to your friends. Although the world of sports is exciting and fun to watch, the amount of time that you need to watch real football to have an intuition good enough to play Fantasy Football is a lot. Most sports fanatics do not realize how much time they are spending on their sport. One football game, for example, is 3 hours each. So on any given Sunday, if one was to watch two football games along with the pre-game show and the post-game show, he would actually end up spending 10 hours on that day.

One needs to examine how much he could be accomplishing if he was to spend this ten hours in remembrance of Allah and learning his religion. It can be a real eye-opener. There are many ways to have fun and still be engaged in worship. May Allah give your friends success in this life and the next.

And Allah knows best.

This answer was indexed from Qibla.com, which used to have a repository of Islamic Q&A answered by various scholars. The website is no longer in existence. It has now been transformed into a learning portal with paid Islamic course offering under the brand of Kiflayn.

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