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Daily launches online football team selector for new season

Football fans can pick a preferred starting line-up for their team thanks to a regional daily’s new tool.

The Leicester Mercury has launch a team selector widget online, which enables Leicester City supporters to pick their favoured eleven ahead of the club’s matches this season.

The widget was launched yesterday, ahead of the club’s first Premier League game of the season against Arsenal on Friday.

Once readers have picked their team, they can see how it compares with the most popular choice overall.

The Leicester Mercury's team selector widget

The Leicester Mercury’s team selector widget

Jonathan Paul, Mercury deputy head of sport, told HTFP: “Since the launch of our new-look website last month, we knew we’d finally have access to this widget and we’ve been eager to try it out because it’s a bit of fun for our readers.

“It’s gone down very well, both in terms of traffic on the website and a really good surge of shares on Twitter. We were confident it would do well, Leicester fans are no different to any others – they all want to put themselves in the manager’s shoes and have a stab at picking the perfect team.

“This was the right week to use it for the first time, just five days before City kick off the Premier League season at Arsenal.

“There’s a great deal of interest in Leicester, not just in the city but around the country too, and this is proving another effective method of engaging the fans online.”

Other Trinity Mirror titles to have made use of similar technology recently include the Birmingham Mail and Huddersfield Daily Examiner.

Last month the Mercury launched ‘Transfer Tinder’ on its website in an interactive spoof of the popular dating app, allowing readers to swipe left or right in order to indicate which of City’s summer transfer targets they would like to sign.

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  • August 8, 2017 at 8:45 am
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    The Huddersfield Examiner has been doing this for a while – spent last season picking my Huddersfield Town teams.

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