75,000 people are playing a fantasy football game where you guess the new pope: ‘You have to choose 11 cardinals, the ones you think are the most papal’

On Wednesday, the College of Cardinals will be locked in the Sistine Chapel to decide who gets to be the next pope. It’s called the Conclave, from the Latin for “with key”, and it takes more than a hundred cardinal electors and multiple rounds of voting to decide who gets to be the new pontiff.

In the webgame Fantapapa, 75,000 people have cast their own votes in a kind of Catholic fantasy football. Players assemble a team of contenders they think are likely to win the vote. “You have to choose 11 cardinals,” Fantapapa’s co-creator Pietro Pace told Euro News, “the ones you think are the most papal.”

The cardinal you think most likely to be selected as pope is your captain, while the one you think least likely gets put in the goalkeeper position.

In a way, this fantasy football webgame is a return to an older system of choosing a pope. Before the sealed room decision-making of the Conclave was implemented, popes were selected by an election ordinary citizens of Rome could vote in. Which makes sense, given the importance of the position and the power that comes with it.

“We know that the religious hierarchies are part of the power in this country and also, let’s say, at an international level, so it is a historic event and it seemed interesting to us to take it from a light-hearted side, but also based on real data,” said Fantapapa’s other co-creator, Mauro Vanetti.