The 2025 Ottoneu Fantasy Football season ended on December 30th. Congrats to everyone who won their leagues, and thank you so much for playing in what I believe is our 10th season of fantasy football!
As you probably are aware, we repeatedly extended our payment deadline for the 2025 Ottoneu Football season. We did this because we lost the ability to take credit card payments, and rather than force everyone to use our bank payment method or risk losing their teams, we chose to delay the deadline and make sure everyone would be able to pay this season. As a result, some of our timelines are a little delayed from normal. So, here is what to expect:
Tomorrow the season will officially be marked as “finished”. Standings will be finalized, trade loans will be wiped, and $4/$1 automatic increases will be applied.
The new and final payment deadline is January 9. If you played Ottoneu Fantasy Football this year, you must pay for your team by this date. If you do not pay by January 9, you will both lose your team and lose the abilty to play Ottoneu Fantasy Sports going forward.
Prizes will be sent out sometime between January 10 and January 12, depending on how renewals go. If your league is a prize league and not fully paid, everyone who did pay will get their fees refunded, minus $20. If your league is fully paid, prizes will be distributed as expected.
I will send a reminder email with a link to this post and a link to the post about how to pay for your team early this week. I’ll update this thread as the tasks listed above get completed.
This site, platform, games, whatever can only exist because of you - that’s why Ottoneu has no advertising, doesn’t sell personal information or emails, and only takes revenue from its customers. It assures that I can run Ottoneu in such a manner that the customer comes first. If you played Ottoneu Fantasy Football this year, please uphold your end of the bargain and pay for your teams. If you don’t want to continue in your leagues, you can get replaced before August 1, 2026.
Thank you all so much for playing Ottoneu Fantasy Football and supporting Ottoneu Fantasy Sports.
So the teams that win the leagues are the ones who are penalized? How is that fair in any way? After you take your $240 out, the rest should be cut up and distributed to the winners? Teams that didn’t pay are dropped anyway.
I understand this sentiment. Playing in a prize league against people who then just didn’t pay up is absolutely lousy. It’s not ok.
Any person who played Ottoneu Fantasy Football this year and then does not pay for their team is stealing both from Ottoneu and, if they are in a prize league, from the winners of their prize leagues.
I don’t think stealing is fair. I’d just be clear about who is doing the stealing.
Anyone who played fantasy football this season and does not renew will be locked out from playing any Ottoneu Fantasy Sports going forward. It is small solace, but hopefully will motivate people to pay ahead of the deadline EOD tomorrow.
This situation stinks, and I hope that Ottoneu is now in a place where this kind of thing just won’t happen again.
I’ve sent out reminders to everyone who hasn’t paid yet for this football season. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and for that I really am grateful. Thank you guys for being understanding and supporting Ottoneu.
I’ll hold off on prize payouts a little bit, just so that we can give some people a bit more time to get caught up. I’ll have a plan for prizes early next week.
I think it is wild that this is where you have ended up. My football league is compiled of people from this community; we don’t know each other in person. This is now two out of the last 3/4 years that our league winner has gotten nothing because 1. The payment system had issues into the season allowing 2. some random fantasy player to not pay for their team at the bottom of the standings. This year we had two owners quit after the draft. As commissioner, I had to scramble to get a new owner for one of the teams and a commitment from the other owner who then ended up quitting again midseason.
All of this would have been avoided if not for Paydala. I was able to scratch and claw and hold the league together after the first Paydala issue a few years ago. Since then, I’ve had to plead with internet strangers to continue to give the league a chance through technical issues, complaints about the large percentage of the fees that go to you, and now another lost year. We signed up for a prize league and have not been able to get prizes multiple times due to a new payment system that none of us asked for. Throughout this, I have never seen any contrition. In fact, when I brought up this issue the first time we had Paydala issues - that we couldn’t fill a bad team midseason because nobody wants to take on a turd of a team - your response was, “this deeply misunderstands the Ottoneu format.”
Half the managers in my league were waiting to see if the owner that quit would pay before paying themselves, we are tired of throwing good money after bad. We had no issues before you made the decision to change payment platforms. Now, we have multiple years of winners not getting paid because bad owners were able to see how poorly their team performed and just not pay.
Our view is that we have been looking past many issues for years because we enjoy the competition and the teams we have built. Many of us came to Ottoneu for baseball and have joined and stuck with football through the issues to support the community/platform despite there being much better platforms for dynasty football, with better payouts.
Now want to further penalize owners who stuck through the past few years of issues by taking away their baseball teams because they have decided a second lost year of football is not worthy of their money. I know many of the owners who now refuse to pay for the 2025 football season have far more baseball teams than football. It certainly seems like you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I feel like this is a misunderstanding. I think this is about league 101, which you seem to be in with 3 others who haven’t paid for this year.
If the 4 of you played this year, you should pay for the service. I delayed the deadline from August 1, 2025 because I didn’t want to disrupt leagues that may have people that can’t pay through the bank transfer. I feel like that is a pretty clear statement of “making people pay or lose their teams now is not fair to the user”, but maybe you understood that delay differently?
If the 4 of you who haven’t paid for that $50 league pay this weekend:
league 101 will have its prizes paid out as expected
none of the 4 of you will be locked out of your other teams
That seems to be the outcome you want.
I’m certainly sorry that there was a disruption with credit card payments. I wrote a few times that it wasn’t ideal and why it happened. You can read this massive thread in case you need a reminder. Choosing to delay payment deadlines instead of keeping our existing calendar and causing massive pain for our users was a clear admission that Ottoneu was going to do right by our users and that Ottoneu would rather take on disruption than disrupt leagues. This is, I believe, “contrition”, or something very much like it.
Anyway, you can pay for your teams for a season you played or you can state to this business that you aren’t interested in paying for it as a service. Like I said in my emails and in this thread, we literally do not take money in any other way - no advertising, no selling information, not a loss leader to try to drive your traffic to other sites, nothing. If you don’t think this service is worth paying for, that’s your decision, but then Ottoneu has to make a decision that is best for its business.
I think its about time to get most of the football prize leagues paid out, as the vast majority of them are entirely paid up. Thank you again for paying for the completed season and making life easier on me and the people who you play fantasy football with.
This is what to expect:
If your league is paid up, I will try to send prizes out this afternoon. Normally I send prizes out for all the leagues together, but that isn’t possible this year, so it will be a bit more of a manual process but I’ll get it done.
If your league has one straggler, Ottoneu will fully pay out prizes for your league. This applies to 2 or 3 leagues I believe. I’ll reach out to the commissioners of these leagues and make sure they understand the situation.
If your league has more than one straggler, I will hold off on dealing with your prizes for now, and give those teams a chance to pay for the just-completed 2025 season. This applies to 2-3 leagues as wellm and I’ll also reach out to those commissioners so they understand the situation.
If you haven’t paid for 2025, like I said earlier in the thread, I’ll be putting a hold on your account today. That does not mean you entirely lose your teams in other sports, but it does mean the following:
You will not be able to take actions in any of your Ottoneu leagues across football, basketball, and baseball
You will see a red banner that indicates that your account is flagged due to not paying your fees for 2025
When you pay for the 2025 season you played, I will be monitoring incoming payments and lifting holds on accounts regularly. If you need me to move faster, just email help@ottoneu.com and I’ll take care of it.
If you decide never to pay, you will be eventually banned from Ottoneu Fantasy Sports and your teams will be released from your account.
Just to reiterate, you are not obligated to play Fantasy Football next season or pay through the next season. Ottoneu just needs you to pay for the season you just finished playing. Your new Paid Through date for any team should be August 1, 2026.
There are around 65 people who this would apply to, and hopefully that number goes down over the next couple of days.
Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks again for playing Ottoneu Fantasy Football.
All the leagues that are fully paid up have had their prizes sent out. You can withdraw them using the Paydala bank method or the printed check, though I’ve been getting some reports that those checks take a while to show up.
I’ll start working on the leagues with only one unpaid team in a little bit.
Users who played fantasy football through the 2025 season and did not pay for it have been flagged in the system. Please email help@ottoneu.com if you have any questions about that. I’ll unflag everyone who pays for their 2025 football team as I see the payment come through.
I have a league this year in a similar predicament- two teams no showed for the draft and another that didn’t bother after a few weeks. Our league loves the Ottoneu format, but the money side of things has been an issue. We’re converting our league to a $20 non prize league and then moving the prize money side to LeagueSafe. Ottoneu gets paid for the service, prize money won’t be an issue in the future. Obviously you can still have teams flake at any point, but setting up a system where someone is paid in Ottoneu and then you can message to pay in LeagueSafe provides some level of control for commissioners.