Paul Rouse: Is this the real life? Or are these leagues just a fantasy?
Fantasy Sports League are now a multi billion dollar global industry
One of the features of the opening of the new soccer season in England is the return of the Fantasy Premier League Game.
This is a competition — “the biggest Fantasy Football Game in the world” — in which over 8m players pick a squad of 15 soccer players from across the 20 teams in the Premier League. This is one person’s dream team.
Although it is a dream tramelled by parameters. In selecting the squad, players must operate within a budget of £100m (€116.6m). Having chosen their squad, players are awarded points if their picks score or set up goals, or don’t concede them, or their team wins, and so on.
Many players compete within closed leagues set up with players whom they already know, as well as being automatically part of the wider global fantasy competition of the full 8m people.
It is free for players to enter the competition and prizes are offered on a weekly and monthly basis, culminating in valuable overall prizes and the designation of being deemed “Fantasy Premier League Champion.”
It’s fascinating to watch how this competition has become a thing in itself.
On the homepage of the Fantasy Premier League Game, for example, there is a podcast giving “expert advice”, latest news, and extensive statistical information on player performance.
The scale of the advertising around the site gives an indication of just how commercially important the game is.
This is true in respect of the direct financial spend on the game by sponsors, but also in the indirect way in which it gets players to buy into the wider sport.
The impetus for the growth of fantasy leagues in this millennium is obviously driven by digital technologies and the internet, but it has its origins back in the 19th century in America. Indeed, it is American sport and its fascination with the statistical organisation of all sport that has driven the development of fantasy leagues.
Baseball is the prime example of this. Back in the late 19th century, board games based on baseball constructed ways for players to pick their own teams and compete with them. This was something that was obviously limited to a very small, localised group. But the games demonstrated the appetite for connecting with the game and its players in ways that went beyond reading about them in a newspaper or, if lucky enough, attending a game.
There things largely stood until in the 1960s, a lecturer at Harvard University, William Gamson, used baseball obsession with statistics around batting and pitching to create a competition whereby competitors could pick a roster at the beginning of a season and receive points based on batting averages and pitcher wins. This allowed for an overall winner to emerge at the end of a season.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, this idea was taken by Daniel Okrent and other sports journalists in America who set up a more developed system of scoring based on game performance, rather than just waiting till the end of the season. When there was a Major League Baseball strike in 1981, the journalists used the idea to fill their column inches. The demand for baseball content during the strike was, in part, sated by the fantasy game which was called “Rotisserie League Baseball”.
For all that fantasy leagues had a marginal place in newspapers in America, it was the construction of internet-based fantasy sport leagues in the mid-1990s that transformed the situation and their place in the world of modern sport.
By 2003 there were more than 15m people playing online fantasy leagues in America. That number has continued to grow across the last two decades with 60m people now competing in fantasy leagues in America and Canada. The Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association says that in those leagues, alone, some $653 (€555) a year on average is spent by participants — this amounts to a fantasy sport market of more than $7bn (€5.95bn).
This expansion was facilitated because online leagues became much more attractive and easy to organise. Information on every aspect of the game — especially results and placements in the table relevant to competitors became immediately available.
Basically, every player could see immediately the merit of the decisions they were taking.
Distance has been removed as an obstacle between players who want to compete with others.
What has also facilitated the whole thing is the manner in which broadcasting companies have involved themselves in the game.
A great example of how that first happened was in the fantasy sports games set up in America by ESPN.
Through these games, ESPN were able to drive millions of people to their website, creating a great boon in advertising.
And more than that, ESPN offered a premium service providing “insider information” and other dedicated, restricted “expert analysis” and statistical material for a subscription fee.
For the people who compete with each other in fantasy league, the range of motivations are wide and particular to individuals. Some people are just casual players who dip in and out in with a light touch.
At the other end of the spectrum there are players who are utterly obsessed and spend hour after hour seeking any piece of information that might help them maximise their choice of player on any given weekend.
What this also facilitates, of course, is the “interactive element” which is deemed necessary on virtually every sports website. And the best thing about fantasy leagues is that they are not restricted just to the season in which a league is running. As Andrew C Billings, Nicholas R Buzzelli & Minghui Fan have written: “Fantasy sport never rests: There are always texts, sites, information, news, trends, rumours, rankings, statistics, discussions, lists, trades and other activities, resources and developments to consider.
“The Yahoo sport site has a fantasy section which links to five different NFL-based games; major fantasy games based on college football, the NBA, the NHL and the MLB, and less utilised games involving sports such as golf and car racing. The general fantasy page provides links to generic articles and sites, updated daily, pertinent to each fantasy game.
“For the NFL-based games there are articles on the best free agent/waiver wire pickups (players still available in most leagues), advice about who to trade away and trade for and what to offer, which underperforming players are likely to improve, who to start and bench each week (depending on match-ups); and lists and rankings of players both generally (the top 50 or 100 players) and by position (for example, the top 20 running backs each week).”
What is also understood is that many of the players in fantasy leagues are exceptionally knowledgeable and enthusiastic about sport.
The league gives them an opportunity to test this knowledge in a practical way (albeit with low stakes) and, in an ideal scenario, gives them an insight into the challenge faces actual managers.
But what is also now clear is that the fantasy leagues has changed how many people view sport. Loving Liverpool and despising Manchester United is rendered at least a little ambiguous if you have Bruno Fernandes on your fantasy team.
At the very least, people competing seriously in Fantasy Leagues end up rooting for the performance of players who are playing for their rivals. But for actual soccer players, too, the fantasy leagues offer a new context in which they perform. This operates in different ways. For example, this year Premier League players and staff have been warned about the risks of taking part in the Fantasy Premier League.
The suspicion was that team news could have been leaked, inadvertently, to opponents. Remarkably, the concern was that software was being used to find changes made to fantasy teams by people who work at Premier League clubs. This information was then thought to be making its way onto social media.
An entirely different example comes from America where the star running back of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Maurice Jones-Drew, declined to score a touchdown in the dying seconds of a 2009 game because he preferred to run down the clock by intentionally stopping short of the goal line.
Jones-Drew already had scored one touchdown and accumulated more than 100 rushing yards. A second touchdown would have meant valuable points to people who had drafted him for their fantasy league teams.
It was the right decision in terms of the game, but Jones-Drew apologised to people who had him on their fantasy teams for the points his match-winning act had cost them: “Tell my fantasy owners I’m sorry,” he said, but “I’d rather take a win any day.”
This was still further evidence of the extent to which fantasy sport has become central to the modern sporting world.
- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.
