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As kids, most of us dreamed of making it big in sports. We wondered how amazing it would be to live like the iconic players and coaches we watched on TV. While most of these dreams may have gone unfulfilled, fantasy sports provided an avenue for die hard sports fans across the globe to experience the game in a different dimension. The concept of letting the public select a fictional set of real athletes and score points when their players scored in real life has today turned into its own industry. Fantasy sports in North America alone is a $3.6 billion affair with over 36 million active players. We look at the rise and development of fantasy sports and what lies ahead.
The Inception: It started with golf
The origins of fantasy sports can be traced to the post-WWII era. In the 1950s, Wilfred Winkenbach designed fantasy golf. Winkenbach was a businessman in Oakland, California and a small stakeholder in the local American football team, the Oakland Raiders. Golf offered an easy and simple fantasy league template. Participants would pick a group of professional golf players and whoever had the lowest stroke total of their respective players at the end of the tournament was the winner.
Building on this rudimentary design, Winkenbach decided to make an adaptation for a more popular sport, (American) football. The idea came to him while travelling with the Raiders on a cross-country tour. In 1962, he along with the public relations manager of the Raiders and a newspaper reporter, sat together and prepared a set of rules to be used for a soon-to-be fantasy football league. The resulting fantasy league, humorously named the Greater Oakland Procrastinator’s League, was initially open to only football team owners, newspaper reporters and football ticket salesmen.
Winkenbach is even today considered to be one of the founding fathers of fantasy sports.
The Milford Plaza Hotel where he started his fantasy league.
Meanwhile, in the early 60s, fantasy baseball also began to emerge on the scene. Professors from Harvard University and University of Michigan began playing something called ‘baseball seminar’, where they would select players and earn points on their players’ season ending batting averages. One professor introduced the game to the next and some even went on to teach their students.
La Rotisserie: The evolution of fantasy sports
Until 1980, existing fantasy sport leagues were based on season-end data which was either already available or would be available near the end of the tournament. Daniel Okrent would transform fantasy sports into what it is today. He introduced the idea of managing a fantasy sport team in sync with the ongoing sports season, incorporating day to day or week to week game scores and player stats. Okrent was a magazine writer and editor at the time and went on to be the first public editor of the New York Times.
In 1980, Okrent pitched his version of a fantasy baseball league to his friends at a New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise. He used his connections to spread the word among several sports writers and publishers. The idea gained more traction during the 1981 American Major League Baseball strike. With no real games to comment on, sports writers began to write about Okrent’s fantasy league, nicknamed the Rotisserie League after the restaurant where it all began.
An early ad for Okrent’s league.
If not for changing the way fantasy sports was played, Okrent can be credited with popularizing it the way it is played today. Exclusive magazines began emerging that focused on fantasy league players, providing in depth statistical data. USA Today, currently one of the widest circulated newspapers in America, was able to grow initially because its sports section gave more in-depth stats than its rivals, which helped early fantasy league players.
Dotcom Era: The internet gave birth to the fantasy league star
The rise of the internet in the mid 90s and the formation of several net-based companies triggered the widespread awareness and popularity that fantasy leagues enjoy today. Prior to this, fantasy players had to rely on magazine subscriptions and newspaper data. Now all the info was available at the click of a mouse.
In 1995, Molson Breweries, one of the oldest companies in Canada, started a popular fantasy hockey website based on players and teams in the National Hockey League of the USA. Targeted at the ice hockey fanbase in Canada and the US, Molson’s initiative went on to win the the International Digital Media Award for best website of 1995.
Molson developed one of the first major online fantasy sport interfaces in the 90s
In 1999, Yahoo became one of the first major media corporations to offer fantasy leagues for free. This sparked a trend among many existing fantasy league providers to start alternate leagues that can be played without any entry fee.
Today and Tomorrow: Fantasy sports set to fly high
Its true that fantasy sports has seen much of its development in the United States. In fact, the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) measures that 10% of America’s population is playing or has played fantasy sports. This popularity has spilled over to the rest of the world too. We now see fantasy football (soccer) and fantasy cricket and in 2006 even a fantasy Congress was launched.
The economics of it all is attracting several analysts and investors as well. The FSTA says that in 2012, $3.38 billion was spent on fantasy league entry fees and services. Daily play games are a recent feature in the fantasy sports world which allows fans who don’t have the patience to follow an entire season to play whenever they want on a day-to-day basis. This feature also allows fantasy league play in the post-season using existing data, similar to what was played back in the 1960s.
Today, a considerable amount of people are playing fantasy leagues from their smartphones, giving rise to a variety of different apps.
Fantasy leagues have proven to be an innovative way of enjoying the sports we love and as they give us a small hint of what it feels like to be a real life sports manager. One can only imagine whats lies in store for the future of this simulating game-play.
