I thought it was time to update you on how my Footstock £100 side challenge is getting on.

Trading

I’ve successfully traded 84 players, for an average margin of 27.8%. The best percentage was 92% on Fosu-Mensah (buy 26p, sell 50p), while the biggest cash margin was £1.25 on Jiminez (buy £16.74, sell £17.99. I’ve got 23 players unsold, totalling £39.83.

Trading is enjoyable. The market is pretty liquid and there are large swings from day to day. Providing you don’t panic, there’s definitely money to be made there.

What would improve trading would be the ability to list multiple cards of the same player at once, instead of having to list them one by one.

I also sold some of the players I’d packed at the start for a total of £49.61.

Rewards

I realised that I could get some bonus cards by working towards some of the rewards on the platform:

• Own 100 cards = free ‘common’ card = Todd Cantwell (sold for £6.78)
• Own 50 ‘common’ cards = free common goalkeeper = Pepe Reina (sold for 99p)

I’m happy with that as a little bonus. Not sure if I’ll be able to work towards any of the other rewards on this budget but it would be interesting to find out.

Tournaments

I’ve entered 9 tournaments so far. 7 were free rolls and 2 were beginner tournaments, which I used 50p coupons to enter. I placed in 3 of the free rolls, winning a total of £3.22.

Tournaments are great fun. The odds of winning something is around 1 in 7, which I think is pretty decent really, especially given the number of free rolls they run.

You do need a decent spread of cards to enter though. I have the 50 bonus cards at the moment so that makes it achievable. When they disappear, I think I’m really going to struggle. As a rough guess, I’d say you need around 150 cards in your collection to have a proper stab at regular tournaments – and that’s going to be tricky for me on this budget.

Games

Games are a pit of despair. High risk, high reward I guess but it’s mostly been loss for me so I don’t think I can risk anymore on this small budget.

I’ve played stat roulette 3 times, using a coupon each time (otherwise it would’ve cost me 49p a go). I’ve lost Billy Sharp and Jeffrey Schlupp and won Layton Stewart – so down overall.

I had a go at a virtual battle – 50p entry for the beginner level. Lost.

I do think the virtual battles are fun and could be reasonably profitable if you have enough cards to choose from but they aren’t for me for this challenge.

Overall profit

It’s pretty hard to work out my overall profit at this point because Footstock include the ‘value’ of my bonus cards in the collection value (a bit misleading). Looking at trades plus the profit/loss from tournaments and games, I think I’m on about £130 at the moment, so roughly 30% up on where I started.

Next week is a Footstock deposit bonus week – 10% bonus on net buys, paid out as tournament coupons – and we’ve also got real football coming back. It’ll be interesting to see how that impacts on the market.