Here’s Mark with his article on how Fantasy Sports conquered the world
How Fantasy Sports Conquered the World
Source: Pexels
Some people think of fantasy sports as a new phenomenon but variations of virtual sports games have been around since the 1950s. The first example was a board game launched in the USA in 1951 called APBA (American Professional Baseball Association).
The early days
The APBA game is considered the precursor of the fantasy sports games we know today. That and later games required players to order cards each year filled with the players’ stats from the season before. These stats were used in combination with dice rolling to determine outcomes. Baseball’s love of statistics made it the perfect game to begin the fantasy sports trend.
The first fantasy American football league was launched by Oakland Raiders owner, Bill Winkenbach, and some friends in a hotel in 1962. By the 1980s, groups of players were organising their own rotisserie leagues with rules very similar to today’s versions of the game. Players would draft players within a set budget and then keep track of their stats over a season to determine the winner.
The internet age
These games became computerised in the 1990s and became known as fantasy baseball. This allowed more players to join and made it easier to manage and track statistical data. As it grew in popularity so did the demand for data and statistics, and whole new industries were born. This was followed by magazines and websites dedicated to fantasy sports. Fantasy sports players became some of the most knowledgeable fans in the world thanks to their understanding of advanced statistics (AKA sabermetrics).
The global spread
The games soon spread to other countries, including Canada and the UK where the rules were easily applied to other sports such as English football (soccer), rugby, darts and Formula One. The first UK version of fantasy football launched in 1971 but it really took off in the early 1990s when it was picked up by Radio 5 and then formed the basis for a TV show starring comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel. Many of the major newspapers run their own competitions, and it is common for workplaces to register their own leagues at the start of the Premier League season.
“Half time stats” (CC BY 2.0) by Ronnie Macdonald
In Australia, there was a big appetite for games such as scratch cards and pokies (slots) but fantasy sports were a little slow to take off. In the 1990s, pokies websites started appearing and remain popular today with plenty of information available about where to play for pokiewins on sites such as Casino Dingo. However, fantasy sports fans in the early 90s had to make do with a cut-out and send-off coupon listed in a Melbourne newspaper which posted results each week.
The first online leagues Down Under were launched around 1995 but these were mainly private leagues between friends. In 2001, things began to kick-off with the arrival of an official AFL game and the launch of VaporMedia who are still running leagues today.
Today, with daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal games, fantasy football is an enormous global business worth more than $7 billion that attracts people from all walks of life.
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