the company behind the cards
Who prints this
Shortprint is one person, two leagues, and ten years of a spreadsheet that nobody was ever supposed to read.
Where it came from
A Google Sheet. Then ten years of funny moments kept in it — the blowouts, the vetoed trades, the keeper somebody regretted for six seasons, the note in row 17 that just says biggest L in league history lol. Then somebody made cards out of them. Then a site to hold the cards.
It hit. Not in the way a product hits — in the way that fourteen adults who had known each other for a decade started checking a website on Tuesdays. Then a second league, on football, got the same thing. Then Shortprint, so any league can.
That order matters more than anything else on this site. The ten years came first and the cards were made out of them. It is not a product that hopes a league will use it; it is a thing one league already built for itself, twice, before it was for sale. And it is exactly what happens to your league on day one.
Bring your spreadsheet.
Two leagues, both real, both still running. Neither of them was a pilot when it started.
Who is actually here
Alex is the founder, and for now the whole of Shortprint. They kept the spreadsheet, made the first cards out of it, built the site that held them, and are building this one. When you mail hello@shortprint.cards, Alex is who reads it and who answers.
There is no team page here because there is no team, and a page of stock photographs with invented titles would tell you something false about how this is being made. One person, twelve leagues in the first cohort, deliberately small enough that the person who answers your mail is the person who prints your cards.
What that buys you: your league is not a ticket in a queue. What it costs you: we are going carefully, and the list of what is not built yet is a real list. It is published, in full, on what is built.
What we refuse
We took everything from the hobby except the money.
Trading cards are in a boom, and most of that boom is speculation — cards bought because they might be worth more later. We borrow the hobby's grammar entirely: pulls, inserts, print runs, checklists, short prints, one of ones. We throw away the part where any of it is an investment.
There is no market, no resale, no cash value and no wagering. Packs are earned from what happened in your league and can never be bought. A card of the week you lost by eighty-four points is worth exactly what it is worth to the eleven people who were there, which is the only number we are interested in.
This is not a compliance position we adopted; it is the product. If money could buy a pull, none of the pulls would mean anything.
Two things we will say plainly
The demo league is real, and its names are not
fbfl.shortprint.cards is a genuine twelve-manager season played forward through a real schedule — the binders, the trades and the pulls on it all actually happened in the product. The managers' names have been changed, because the people in that league did not sign up to be a sales page. Nothing on it is a mock-up and nothing on it is a screenshot.
Nobody is on a card who does not want to be
The cards are about people who are in on the joke. If a manager in your league would rather not be printed, they are not printed — tell us or tell your commissioner, and they come off the set. That is not a policy we negotiated; it is the only version of this that is any fun.
Ask a real person
One inbox, read by the person who built this. Or put your league in front of us and we will tell you what its set would look like.