Every fantasy league has one person doing unpaid administrative work. They set the league up, chase the dues, referee the argument nobody wrote a rule for, and once a year host an event for twelve people. The platform does none of that. It scores the games, and it is silent on everything that actually causes a fight.
This is the other half — the governance half of running a league, printed and ready to fill in.
What makes it worth paying for
The Commissioner’s Rulings Library. Twenty-four disputes every league eventually has: the forgotten lineup, the player ruled out after lock, the abandoned team with an elite roster, the tied FAAB waiver bid, the rebuild trade to a contender, the “you owe me one next year” handshake, the keeper who went undrafted, the rigged-randomizer accusation, the stat correction that flipped a result already marked final, the manager who has not paid and the draft is tonight.
Each one gives you the two or three defensible ways to rule, what each ruling commits your league to the next time it happens, which option to default to — and one line of precedent wording to paste straight into your log. It is deliberately not a list of answers, because almost none of these has one right answer. It is what lets a commissioner choose deliberately instead of under pressure, and rule the same way twice.
Four reference tables, with the arithmetic already done. What your prize pool actually pays out — eight common league-size-and-dues combinations, under three payout structures, in whole dollars that total the pool exactly. Auction budget math, including the max-bid number almost nobody tracks. Every pick number for every seat in a 12-team, 16-round snake draft, and how many picks pass between each seat’s first two. And what a keeper costs in year three under three escalation rules, which is the table to read before you choose a keeper rule, because that choice is invisible until year three.
The seventeen documents, and the 71 pages in them
Governance. A 13-section league constitution — including the four clauses leagues most often leave out, which are also the hardest to add once an argument has already started. A scoring and roster settings sheet that compares football’s three formats column by column and carries the basketball, baseball and hockey formats alongside them. A keeper and dynasty addendum. A trade rules and veto-method addendum that compares five veto methods and what each one costs you. A dues, prize split and payout ledger. A new-manager welcome sheet.
Draft day. The draft order and keeper declaration sheet. A landscape wall draft board with the snake direction pre-printed beside each round, plus a cut-out sheet of team labels and position tags. An auction board and budget tracker with the max-bid column — landscape, like the draft board. A nomination order and bidding log with a page on how to nominate well. A personal cheat sheet for every manager. And a timed draft-day run sheet for whoever is hosting — a week out, the hour before, the ninety seconds to read out loud, and the ten minutes afterward that nobody remembers to do.
The season. A commissioner’s calendar with the reminder that has to go out before each deadline. A trade proposal and approval log. A dispute and precedent log — your league’s case law. A landscape season wall sheet for the office. And a multi-season record book with champions, all-time records, season superlatives, the punishment roll, and a page for league lore.
Plus a printable router from 33 real league moments straight to the page that covers each.
Sport-neutral, deliberately
Fantasy football, fantasy basketball, fantasy baseball, fantasy hockey, or a league you invented. What makes a league argue is never the sport — it is the gap between what people assumed and what was written down. There are no player names and no team names anywhere in the kit, because both change every year and neither belongs in a template.
Fillable PDF and editable Word
Every page ships both ways. Click a highlighted field and type — that works in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader and most desktop PDF readers; some browser and phone viewers show PDFs flat, in which case save the file first or open the Word version. Or print it and fill it in by hand: US Letter, and it prints cleanly on A4. Print at actual size rather than scale-to-fit, because three of the pages are landscape wall sheets. Open the Word file to change the wording, delete a clause that does not apply, or add rows to a table. The documents themselves are white-label — no branding at all — so once your league ratifies them they are your league’s own constitution.
Try the free version first
If you just want the rules written down before this year’s draft, the free League Constitution Starter is eight of these clauses as a fillable PDF — no email, no signup. The full kit adds the five clauses that matter once something has gone wrong, the whole draft-day kit, the season logs, the rulings library and the computed tables.
Own it, don’t rent it
Buy it once and keep it. No subscription, no account, and no app that gets discontinued between one season and the next. Next August it is still on your drive, and the record book still has every champion in it.
Personal license for you and your league: print the filled-in pages and hand them to your managers as much as you like — just please don’t resell or redistribute the source files. These are general templates for running a hobby league, not legal or tax advice. Anything involving pooled money is treated differently from place to place — keep the pool modest, keep the written ledger, pay out exactly what you collected, and check your local rules before running a league at any real scale.
