Since entering the Fantasy Sports Industry I’ve done a lot of research. One of the more interesting facts I’ve turned up is that football is far and away the most played fantasy sport. I wasn’t surprised that it is the most popular, judging by the fantasy players I knew, but I never would have guessed that it accounts for 85% of the industry. That means that of the 7 or so sports commonly offered, 6 reside in the long tail.
Why it is that way was one of the first questions we asked. The first and most obvious answer is that football is the most popular sport in America. The average NFL game is attended by almost 68,000 people, which is over twice as large as the second most popular sport, baseball, which in turn is about double the size of basketball. The NFL has television revenues of over $3.2 billion per year, whereas the MLB is in the middle of a 7 year deal for $3 billion in total. That is despite the fact that the MLB has about 10x the number of games (baseball teams play 162 per season, compared to 16 for football) that the NFL does. The NBA has a number of games in between the NLF and the MLB (82 per team) and television revenues of about $766 million, placing it well above baseballs roughly $430 million.
So if all else were equal, and you ignored the other sports (which you more or less can in terms of current market share) you still wouldn’t expect football to have that big of a slice. By television revenue (it’s best metric) it’s about 75% of the industry. By any other metric you’d expect it to be, at best, about half of the market, and by some (total ticket sales, for instance) not even in first place. There must be something more at play.
I think the answer lies in the format of the games. With most team sports, the rules are similar. Leagues start with a draft, and then run throughout the course of the sport’s season. Throughout that season, fantasy team owners continually manage their roster, dropping and picking up athletes, benching and starting them, and even trading them with other owners in the league. Each time an athlete plays in a real live game, the owner gets points based on their performance. Sometimes the points are based on an athlete’s stats times a multiplier, sometimes they’re based on leading the league in given categories, but the basic principle is the same: the owner whose athletes perform the best wins.
There’s one key difference, though, between football and the rest of the team sports (we’ll cover individual sports in a later post) which is that games aren’t played every day. In many weeks, games exist only on Sunday and Monday. Games can be played on other days as well (Thursday games happen a few weeks a year) but it’s generally all over the course of two or three days.
This means a few things to a fantasy owner. For one, almost all athletes play every week. Each has one bye per year, and other than that typically plays every game while healthy. Injuries and other events that might cause a player to have to change his roster almost all happen by Monday night (though their effect may not be known until later).
This means that fantasy football owners do most of their work on Tuesday. You can be a competitor while logging into your account only once a week. There is definitely some benefit to remaining active all throughout the week (injury reports progress, teams announce which QB will start, etc.) but not much. If a player needs to take a week’s vacation, as long as he can log in on Tuesday he’ll pretty much be fine.
So fantasy football revolves around the week. Baseball and basketball, on the other hand, are daily games. Teams play multiple games per week, and they can be scheduled on any day. Players get injured every day of the week. An owner is typically allowed a certain amount of starts, for instance in baseball, one can start each position 162 games per year, a concern a fantasy football owner never has.
The management of a baseball or basketball team can be overwhelming, especially should the player draft a few teams. In that case it’s not uncommon to have one player from each MLB team, meaning a player has to track and adjust for around 100 games each week. In an NFL week, players have 16 or fewer games they must pay attention to.
It would seem that the amount of effort involved is probably responsible for fantasy football being more popular than it should be. That’s why we’ve made an attempt at simplifying the other fantasy sports. On our site, players simply draft when they want to and have no ongoing commitment. You take a look at the week’s matchups in advance, use them to draft your team, and then you’re done. If you want something to do tomorrow, you come back and do it again, and if you’d rather spend a relaxing day at the beach, you can do so without worrying how far behind you’ll fall.
We expect that fantasy football will still be our most popular sport. It is the new American pastime. But we’re going to do our best to increase the amount of participation in the others as well. And from what we’ve been seeing in our basketball freerolls of late, it seems people are responding. \
