By Nathan John, University of Gloucestershire
Embed from Getty ImagesWhat is fantasy sports?
In definition, a fantasy sport or ‘roto’ for short, is a type of game often played using the Internet where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams composed of proxies of real life players of a given professional sport.
These teams then compete based on the statistical performance of those players in actual games.
This performance is converted into points that are totaled together according to a roster selected by each fantasy team’s manager.
These point systems can be simple enough to be manually calculated by a league admin who coordinates the overall league, or points can be compiled and calculated using computers tracking actual results of the professional sport.
In fantasy sports, team owners draft, trade and cut players, according to results and performances, based of the real sport.
The insane growth of fantasy sports
Over the past few decades, fantasy sports have grown to become a staple part of the average football fan’s routine, lifestyle and experience when watching matches.
Since the mid 2000s, fantasy sports had started to become a mainstream hobby within all sports and fantasy sport as a whole reached a market share of $45.9 million in 2019.
According to researchers within the market, the rise is mainly due to the increasing youth population, growth in digital infrastructure, availability of affordable smartphones, increasing popularity of players in various sports, growing investment in internet infrastructure, and the launch of fantasy sports applications.
This makes sense, particularly when you consider how frequently fans use technology in aiding them with their match day experience; for example, when purchasing tickets, taking photographs, online gambling or checking score updates etc.
The shift from pen and paper to screens has produced a major change in the landscape of how fantasy sports operate, a point explained by long-time player, Brody Ruihley, a professor of sport leadership and management at Miami University, in an interview with Marketplace’s Andy Uhler.
“All of a sudden, now we can check our lineup on our phone. We can draft on the phone. We can see the activity through apps, through our tablets, through our cellphones.”
Embed from Getty ImagesSpeaking to sports data analyst and Co-Founder of website ‘Sportsdatalabs‘ Mark Gorski, he hinted on the modern fascination of data within sports as one of the main reasons for fantasy sports growing success.
Explaining the impact that data analysis has had within sports and it’s connection to fantasy sports, Gorski explained, “The modern sports fan loves stats right? I mean you take for instance Fantasy football in the U.S, fantasy managers can analyse anything from player’s running stats to their expected attacking threat. Stats in sports has gone crazy.”
How big of a market is fantasy sports?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the global fantasy sports market size is estimated to be worth USD $22780 million in 2022 and is forecast to a readjusted a huge size of USD $47940 million by 2028, with a CAGR of 13.2% during the review period.
According to reports, the fantasy sports market’s growth is expected to accelerate to at 6.51% annually over the course of the next five years alone.
This means the market is expected to double within the next decade alone, and it’s impact within the football community should follow suit in growing further and starting to have even more of an impact on fans who play.
Fantasy Premier League & fantasy sports within football
The competition within fantasy sports is very intense, and most games will require you to have a good strategy to succeed while playing the game.
This is no more evident than in arguably the Globe’s biggest Fantasy Sport franchise ‘Fantasy Premier League’ or FPL for short.
In the two decades FPL has existed, since it’s formation in 2002, it has grown to become a global phenomenon for Football fans worldwide, with over eight million recognised players, it is by far the most played and most successful fantasy sports platform in existence.
To put the size of FPL into perspective, there are over 253 national leagues, with 2 million players in England alone.
If it were a country, it would be bigger in terms of population than countries like Hong Kong, Barbados and Maldives, just to name a few.
FPL has even become it’s own organisation, with it’s own social media and a YouTube channel under the name ‘FPL Family’, where people with expertise in the game are employed to give tips and advice to viewers who watch the weekly show.
Much like assets on the stock market, players are traded between FPL “managers” who can determine the value of a player based on their performance.
If the player is out of form, they will drop in value as managers will sell them and the opposite is true if they are in form, as their value will increase.
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Rise of esports gaming
In short, an esport is a multiplayer video game played competitively for spectators, typically by a professional gamer.
Esports, like fantasy sports, was also hugely affected by COVID-19 and this meant a huge increase in the viewership of the sport, with an expected 8.7% year-on-year growth, as well as an overall esports audience of 474 million as of the end of 2021.
It is relevant to mention esports growth alongside fantasy sports, as the two have expanded almost in unison, and this is due largely in part to the equally as large expansion in technologically available platforms, that people now use in day-to-day life.
This rise in esports and fantasy gaming has come predominately since the early 2000s and 2010s, and the number of players have quadrupled over the past two decades, from a mere 15 million globally in 2003, to a huge 60 million as of 2018.
The Premier League have even now introduced their own e-league, branded the ‘ePremier League’, where players can represent a Premier League club and battle it out via the EA football game ‘FIFA’, in a simulation of the real life competition.
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The future of fantasy sports in football?
It is not just within the UK and US that the trend is growing, with India now too waking up to the world of fantasy sports and the country has an estimated 360 million fantasy gamers as of 2022.
The concept is becoming a worldwide phenomenon and as more countries become technologically advanced across the globe, the access to fantasy sports becomes more of a reality for a global audience.
The rise of fantasy sports across the globe was also something Gorski was quick to point out, as he explained, “You see now that fantasy sports is starting to spread to other nations, you know you see a lot of players in India and Malaysia and even South America, so it’s definitely become a global hit.”
Fantasy sports are growing at a lightning rate and with the advent of technology becoming a more and more integrated part of the average fan’s experience at football, it is hard to see the trend dying down anytime soon.
The future certainly looks exciting for fantasy and esports, and with the growing number of players and competitions each year, the sport only looks set to boost in popularity in the near future.
NathanJamesJohn.com 