Gianni Buttice has a job millions of football fans would envy.

For the last decade, he has made his name and living in the world of fantasy football, specifically the Premier League’s own official version of it, the FPL.

Once a source of fun for wannabe managers or an excuse for yet more footie debate, fantasy football has become a serious business, especially for Gianni.

After 10 years as a regular on the league’s official FPL Show, the 38-year-old is regarded highly enough to be tagged as an expert during his regular appearances for BBC and Sky Sports.

It’s a description many of us would delight in, although Gianni, from Caldecott in Rutland, prefers pundit - “I always feel like ‘expert’ just puts the target on your back.”

His path into a career in sport was neither straightforward nor obvious.

Looking to breaking into sports journalism, Gianni covered local teams for BBC Radio Gloucestershire while studying broadcast journalism at university only to be pulled in a different direction.

“I wanted to move to London, so I ended up taking a job in shopping television which sounded good, but I soon realised that it was all about sales, not TV,” he recalled.

The next decade was spent in sales, most notably two years aboard cruise ships working for a high-end New York jewellers with his Stamford-born wife.

It earned them enough to buy a flat in Croydon and a place on the eyewateringly expensive property ladder in London.

“It was a couple's job and they would send us on the world's best cruise ships selling jewellery - what they called a trunk show host,” Gianni explained.

“We would bounce around with a collection of $3million worth of jewellery in a rucksack, pitch up on a cruise ship, sell it, and then move onto another ship.”

By the time he was living out of suitcases on the seven seas, Gianni was already hooked on Fantasy Premier League - and was good at it.

About 10 years ago, he and a friend decided to turn their FPL aptitude into a book which reached number three on Amazon’s highly competitive football market.

“The success of the book, meant I could get a shot on the Premier League’s very own fantasy show. We don't see it in England, but it goes out to 150-plus countries,” Gianni said.

“It was the only bit of content that was being done around the game.

“I did that for about 10 years which was amazing. Off the back of that I got a YouTube channel a few years later, and then got invited to do stuff for the BBC and Sky because I was one of the Premier League’s original FPL experts.”

Gianni’s YouTube channel now has almost 50,000 subscribers and provides daily updates during the season along with more in-depth coverage around gamedays on weekends.

When not creating content and also working for football charity, Street Child United, he’s busy keeping up to speed with the fast-moving and unpredictable world of the Premier League.

Outside of trips to the television studios, Gianni is able to work from home in Caldecott - where the couple moved to start a family - and play a hands-on dad’s role to his two young children.

It’s a notion of working life that many would kill for.

“Half my working week in a way is creating content, and the other half is preparing that content by watching games or looking at the stats and the data,” he said.

“When I describe my job to people, they say ‘what, you just talk about a game?’.

“Because it's leaked into mainstream sport, it means people like me have the opportunity we wouldn't have had maybe five, six years ago - to call it a full-time job.”

FPL’s popularity mirrors the growth of E-sports where simulated games based on actual competitive sport has in turn become a sport of its own.

Gianni said: “When I first started making content back in 2017, it’s grown from probably three million managers around the world to now more than 10 million. Last season there was 12 million sign-ups.”

With his painstakingly-constructed teams and tips consumed by legions of game players, there is a lot riding on whether his picks perform. The target on his back.

“There is a pressure to do well because there are so many eyes on my team, but there are no guarantees,” he said.

“I might have well-informed opinions, but those opinions don't always land, because football doesn't always go to plan.

“The success of my content and the amount of views I get is usually based on me having a good season.

“I know come January that my YouTube views will either be strong because I'm having a good season or would have halved because people have gone ‘I’m not following him now because he's been rubbish this year’.

“Obviously your YouTube views are what pays the bills, so it's important you get it right.”

The game has become ever more complex with more ways to score points, all of which Gianni must keep on top of, along with the fast-moving world of the actually sport itself.

“FPL isn't just about who scores the goal and who gets the assist now,” he explained.

“It's how you earn bonus points or how you earn defensive contribution points through things like tackles, blocks, interceptions for bonus points, chance creation, or successful dribbles. The bonus points system alone has about 35 metrics.”

There will be supporters left a little cold by all of this, as gut-based analysis and emotive debates about teams and players are increasingly replaced by spreadsheets and analytics.

FPL, for example, has been won by a maths professor, while another of Gianni’s friends - and a fellow FPL content creator - teaches maths.

“They are FPL fans first, football fans second,” said Gianni, who supports Italy in homage to his dad’s home country.

“One of my USPs is that I am a diehard football fan first and then an FPL fan second. I'm not your traditional FPL nerd or mathematician or numbers guy.

“There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but most of the content creators who have done well are the data-driven analytics guys.

“I've always been more of an emotional, take-a-punt, maverick-style manager than someone who studies the numbers.

“I try to do more analytical stuff because I know it makes me a better manager, but my natural default is I’m a football fan.”