Terms of use

1.About these terms

Podium is run by [Company legal name], registered at [registered address] ("we", "us"). You can reach us at [support email].

These terms apply when you sign in and every time you use Podium. If you do not agree to them, do not use the service.

We may change these terms. We will tell you in the app before a change takes effect, and competitions you have already entered keep the rules they started with.

2.Who can play

• You must be 21 or over and live in Ethiopia. We may ask you to prove your age before paying out a prize.
• Podium runs inside Telegram, and you sign in with your Telegram account. One person may have one Podium account, and we use the phone number Telegram holds for you to enforce that.
• You play with a Fantasy Premier League team that is yours. One FPL team can be linked to one account only.

3.Your Fantasy Premier League team

Podium is not affiliated with the Premier League or Fantasy Premier League. Fantasy Premier League is a trademark of its owners; we use its public data to score competitions.

You link your team by adding a short code we give you to your FPL team's name, which shows us the team is yours. We never ask for your FPL password, and you should never give it to anyone.

• You can change your linked team once every 7 days, and not while you are in a competition that has not finished.
• A competition you have already played keeps the team you played it with.
• You manage your team, transfers, captain and chips on the FPL site. We only read what FPL publishes.

4.Your wallet

Your Podium wallet holds Ethiopian birr (ETB). Entry fees come out of it and prizes go into it. It is not a bank account and earns no interest.

Deposits

• You deposit with telebirr, to the number shown in the app, and then enter the transaction reference from your telebirr message.
• A deposit is added to your wallet automatically when it matches the confirmation telebirr sends us: the same reference, sent from the number you told us you paid from. We credit the amount telebirr reports. A reference we never received is never credited.
• A single deposit is between 50 ETB and 100,000 ETB, and you can have up to 5 deposit or withdrawal requests waiting at once.
• Deposits sent from a different number, that are unusually large, or where something about the payment looks wrong are checked by our staff before they are credited, which can take longer.

Withdrawals

• You can withdraw from 100 ETB to your own telebirr number. The amount is held in your wallet while we check the request, then sent by us through telebirr.
• Withdrawals are [free / subject to a fee of …] and are normally sent within [time frame].
• We may delay or refuse a withdrawal while we check for fraud, a breach of these terms, or where the law requires it. We will tell you why unless the law prevents us.

5.Competitions

Official competitions are run by us and open to every manager. Friends competitions are created by managers and can only be found and joined with their code.

• The entry fee is taken from your wallet when you join. You see the fee, the scoring gameweeks, the prizes, the platform's share and the tie-breaker before you join.
• Entry closes at the FPL deadline of the competition's first gameweek. Nobody can join after it.
• You can leave a competition before that deadline and get your entry fee back in full.
• The manager who created a friends competition can cancel it before the deadline. Every entry fee is then returned.
• A competition that has fewer managers than it needs by the deadline is cancelled, and every entry fee is returned.
• We may cancel a competition if something goes wrong that makes a fair result impossible. Every entry fee is then returned.

6.How competitions are scored

• Your score is your FPL team's official points for the competition's gameweeks, as FPL publishes them. That includes FPL's automatic substitutions and vice-captain rule.
• Whether chips count and whether transfer points hits are taken off is set for each competition and shown before you join.
• Points shown while matches are being played are provisional and can change. A gameweek's points become final when FPL confirms them, usually the morning after its last match.
• A match postponed out of a gameweek counts where FPL counts it. A gameweek ends with its last match, whichever days its matches fall on.
• Once FPL has confirmed a gameweek, the result is based on those figures. A correction FPL makes after that does not change a result we have already paid.

7.Prizes

• The prize pool is the entry fees of every manager in the competition, less the platform's share. The share is set when the competition is created, shown before you join, and never more than 30%.
• With fewer than 6 managers the winner takes the whole pool. With 6 or more, 1st takes 60%, 2nd 30% and 3rd 10%.
• Managers level on points are separated by the competition's tie-breaker, shown before you join: fewest transfers, most bench points, or none. Managers still level share the prizes for the places they fill, split equally to the cent. A cent that cannot be split goes to whoever joined first.
• Prizes are paid into your wallet once the final result has been checked, normally within a day of FPL confirming the last gameweek. We may hold a result for review before paying it, and tell you it is being checked.
• Each prize is paid once. If a prize is paid by mistake, we may take it back from your wallet.

8.Fair play

You must not:

• hold more than one account, or play with a team that is not yours;
• work with other managers to fix a result, or enter competitions on someone else's behalf;
• use someone else's telebirr account, or money that is not yours;
• exploit a fault in the service, or try to get around a limit or a check.

If we find that you have, we may cancel your entries, withhold or take back prizes, close your account and, where the law requires it, report it.

9.When something goes wrong

If FPL is unavailable, scores update once it is back. If we make a mistake in a result, we correct it from FPL's official figures.

[Limitation of liability, and what happens to entries and balances if the service stops, as settled with a lawyer.]

10.Playing responsibly

Podium is for enjoyment, not income. Only enter competitions with money you can afford to lose.

If playing stops being fun, take a break. You can ask us at [support email] to close your account or stop you entering paid competitions for a period, and we will do so.

11.Closing your account

You can ask us to close your account at any time at [support email]. You can withdraw your balance first; after our checks we send any remaining balance to your telebirr number.

We may close or suspend an account that breaks these terms. We keep the records the law requires us to keep, as set out in the Privacy notice.

12.Law and disputes

[Governing law and where disputes are heard, as settled with a lawyer.]

If you have a complaint, write to [support email] first. We reply within [time frame].