With not long to go till the AFL season ‘kicks off’ (see what I did there? Hire me Channel Seven, I look amazing in Standard Definition), many of you will be in a rush to finalise your SuperCoach teams.

Some of you will be keen to know how to go about it and looking online for hints and tips.

There’s no shortage of SuperCoach strategy advice but I’ve decided to instead tell you the actual truth of what will happen.

1. Put everything else in your life on hold

Family? Work? Friends? Forget it. You’ve decided to play SuperCoach and everything else is suddenly secondary.

You’ll spend your time at work analysing players, SuperCoach websites and becoming fixated on the most minor of footy news.

Your relationship will suffer, your friends or friend will drift away and you’ll be summoned to HR for the first formal warning.

2. Write a Shortlist

Carefully craft a list of the players you would like on your team. Try to get a good balance of superstars, players going cheaply, players on the rise and cover all the positions.

3. Realise most of your players are from your AFL team

Even though your actual AFL team is rubbish, you suddenly realise you only really watch them and have massively over-selected from their list.

As you read their stats from last season, it will dawn on you how bad some of your favorite players actually are.

This will be just the first step in ruining football for you.

Spend the next few days suddenly reading up on other teams.

4. Convince yourself you’ve worked out some clever strategies

Now that you’ve read some how-to-guides online and done some research, you’re convinced you’ve cracked the secret to this thing. You want to tell everyone but also don’t want to give it away.

Instead you just act smug when people bring the topic up and drop huge hints about how you know some things others don’t.

5. Enter your team online

You’re almost there. You enter your team online and suddenly you’re over on the salary cap. You check your calculations and realise you should have paid attention at high school.

Maths finally turned out to be important for something and it’s cost you days of your life.

Weirdly, despite your research, you’ve shortlisted players who have been delisted and one who retired two years ago. This is not good.

You spend a late night readjusting everything and go to bed at 3.36 am, tired but elated. You’re now ready to win this thing.

6. Round One

You’ve checked the injuries and appointed your Captain and Vice Captain. You even resisted the temptation to make a few trades, knowing you needed to trust the research.

You get smashed. It’s Mark Neeld bad. At work, people actually don’t raise it with you as an act of compassion. They just whisper, ‘that’s the person that’s really bad at SuperCoach.’

7. Double Down

This isn’t the time to doubt the strategy. One round does not a season make. Would Allan Jeans have panicked? No. He would have trusted his team.

You make no major changes. You feel good about this.

8. Round 2

Wow. Round One looks good now. It was a disaster all the way. Your Captain ended up in negative points. How is that even possible?

9. Ringing the Changes

You’re already behind and something needs to be done. Screw Allan Jeans, he didn’t have to coach a SuperCoach team in the modern era. What would he know?

You use almost all of your trades. It’s a bloodbath. You choose players who have done really well in the first two rounds and take some big risks to catch up.

Some of these moves are actual genius you think. Hope returns.

10. Round Three

All the players you traded seemed to have blinders and your new players are a disaster. What’s worse, the players who play in your actual AFL team did terribly, making you feel bitter about them in a way you didn’t think possible.

This is now ruining your actual love of football and you also hate yourself.

You make minor changes for Round Four. SuperCoach is a game for children you tell the cab driver on the way home one night.

He tells you he’s leading his league and is in the top 100 in the state. You tell him in detail your team list and he doesn’t charge you for the ride in pity.

11. Round Four onwards

You’re not really paying any attention anymore. You make changes occasionally when you remember but it’s half hearted. You’re no longer putting any time into research.

With each week that goes by you do less until a month slides by and you haven’t even logged in.

Luckily, counseling is going really well with your partner and HR seems to have stopped after two formal warnings.

You vow never to do this stupid thing again.

12. Next season

You’ve had a think about things. You’ve pinpointed where you went wrong. Time to get the laptop out and do a bit of research.