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Multi-Year Fantasy Football Teams Require Renewal

All multi-year teams require that you pay an entry fee every year. The only exception occurs during the final year(s) of a league with a set term, such as a contract league. In the case of fantasy football contract leagues, for example, the deposit pays for the final two years, so no renewal is necessary for those two years.

The following leagues all require annual renewal, and the renewal cost is always the same as the annual entry fee:

• Dynasty leagues
• Keeper leagues
• Salary cap leagues
• Contract leagues
• Legacy leagues

A full description of each of these league types can be found in the official fantasy football rulebook.

Didn't I Pay a Deposit Last Year?

Yes, you did, if you joined a new league last year. But you were not paying an advance on the entry fee. You were actually buying a multi-year team by placing a deposit under it, and most multi-year teams carry a deposit.

Why do you Require a Deposit on Keeper/Dynasty Leagues

Again, you should think of the deposit as the price you pay to own a keeper or dynasty team. You still have to pay the entry fee to play each new year. Yet it's important to understand exactly what the deposit does for you:

• The deposit gives the team value, making it attractive to orphan buyers in the case that a team gets abandoned. This helps keep your fantasy league alive.
• A reasonable deposit ties you to the league, indicating that you are serious about playing for more than one year, rather than trading away all your future picks to try to win in the first year, and then dumping the team. If the deposit is too small, this becomes a strong temptation.
• The deposit stays with the team until the league ends. Regardless of what causes the demise of a league, deposits are always returned to the owners of the teams at the time the league closes!
• If you leave the league, your team is sold. You will be able to set a buy-it-now price, or you can leave it to go up for auction, but either way, when the team is sold, you get the money from the sale. You do not get your deposit returned. It stays with the team, and now belongs to the new owner.
• Once in a great while, DataForce dips into the deposit to be able to drastically reduce the price of an orphan that just won't sell. For example, we may pull $50 from the deposit to decrease the orphan price $50 on the marketplace. But this is rare; we really prefer keeping the deposit intact, as this helps keep the league alive, so we're willing to first take a reasonable loss on orphan sales.

Why is the Renewal Deadline so Early?

May isn't that early for die-hard fantasy football fans. Most of our keeper/dynasty teams renew long before the deadline ... many as early as January ... because the owners want to participate in trading players and picks throughout the offseason. Others are so anxious for the season to begin that all owners of a league agree to draft early, in June. In general, we encourage early payment because it gives us plenty of time to sell abandoned teams, and because the buyers of abandoned teams often troll the internet for bargains in May and June. If we go any later in the year, these buyers have already found other leagues to play in.

I Don't Want to Play Anymore. What do I do?

You must decide to drop your team before the renewal deadline. If you make no attempt to renew before the deadline, the computer will drop it for you automatically.

To drop your team now, just click the Drop button on this page. When you do this, the computer will ask if you would like to set a price on the team, which will place the team on the Orphan Marketplace page until the auction begins in May. If you're certain you don't want to play anymore, then the earlier you set your team up for sale, the better off you are.

I can anticipate the next question: How much should I sell my team for? The answer is, probably about half of its deposit. Buyers are typically looking for either very good teams or for teams with very good picks in the upcoming draft.

What Happens if the Team Doesn't Sell?

Each dropped team goes through several stages as it progresses through the process of finding a new owner:

1. If you set a price as you dropped it, that will place the team on the orphan marketplace for anybody to see. It might sell this way.
2. When the renewal deadline passes, all unrenewed teams get placed in an orphan auction, including teams which did not sell on the marketplace. This is a blind bidding auction, and it last for one week, after which the winning bidders will receive the teams for the bid price. A team will not be sold at auction for less than 10% of its deposit.
3. If there are no bidders in the auction, or if all of the auction bidders on a team default on payment, then we assign the team a new buy-it-now price, based on our evaluation of its selling potential. We will set the price relatively low, because we really want to get teams sold. This price will remain for about a week.
4. Teams which still remain unsold will all be given a $1 give-away price. Anyone with an extra dollar in their account can snap them up on the cheap.
5. Finally, if a team is so bad that nobody will give even a dollar for it, you get nothing out of it. It will probably be run this year by a shill assigned by DataForce. This shill cannot win money with the team, and cannot participate in waiver bidding or trading unless approved by the league. The shill's job is to make the team respectible again through savvy free agent moves so that it can sell the next year, when the shill gets the money for the sale.

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