I have a confession to make. This year, some friends of mine and I are playing in a fantasy NASCAR league. I don’t particularly care about NASCAR; I haven’t watched even a portion of a race in at least ten years, and don’t plan on starting now. And yet, as I write this I am keeping a browser tab open to track the results of qualifying for the Campingworld.com 500. I have taken the time to learn that Kevin Harvick has won 3 of the past 4 races at Phoenix International Speedway, the site of the Campingworld.com 500, and that Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Brad Keselowski each have three finishes in the top five over that same timespan.
What on earth would compel me to do this?
For those of you who don’t know, fantasy sports are games that utilize the statistics of professional sports. The most popular versions are fantasy baseball and football, but hockey, soccer, racing, golf, and soccer have all become fairly widespread. Typically, the game is played in leagues of somewhere around 12 people. Real life athletes will be divided among teams via a draft or auction process, so that an athlete can only be on one fantasy team in the league.
Following the draft, human players acquire points based on the real life performance of the players on their fantasy team. Scoring systems vary widely from sport to sport, and most sports have a few popular variations. In general, though, things like touchdowns, yards gained, home runs, stolen bases, strikeouts (for pitchers), etc. are rewarded. Just like real sports leagues, players can also be traded between human managers, benched during cold spells, or outright released in favor of other players who no other team in the league yet owns. In essence, fantasy sports are games in which human players compete over statistics.
Most fantasy leagues operate on major sports media websites (ESPN, CBS, and Yahoo are the three most prominent ones), though a number of smaller sites also host games. Given the widespread availability of sports statistics, leagues can also be run completely manually or offline, just as they were in the early days of fantasy sports. Generally, though, most players use a well-known provider, as they usually provide mobile apps for the game and generally streamline the process for the human players.
It is likely that fantasy football and baseball in something resembling their current form can both be traced to the early 1960’s (Draper, p. 10), but variations likely existed in private circles many years prior. Perhaps most famously, Jack Kerouac played a game that somewhat resembled fantasy baseball for a good part of his life. Regardless, the games remained fairly marginal until the proliferation of Internet access in the mid-to-late 1990’s. The explosion of Internet-capable mobile devices in the mid-2000’s again boosted the popularity of fantasy sports, and now even major network football broadcasts provide stats and analysis that cater to fantasy players.
As a game, fantasy sports are often lumped in with gambling. To be sure, fantasy games possess some characteristics of gambling. They are often played for money. In the end, regardless of how much preparation a fantasy player puts into his or her team, winning or losing is determined by the flukiness of professional sports. There is also, however, a significant element of skill involved. A competitive player who puts in time doing research in a league in which the rest of the players participate much more casually, perhaps only gathering their information for a few major national sports broadcasts, will likely finish near the top of the standings most years.
This balance of skill and luck is, I think, part of what makes fantasy sports so compelling. Skill is rewarded enough so that players feel that putting in time and effort will be rewarded. At the same time, luck plays enough of a role that less competitive players still have a legitimate chance of winning. They might not finish in the top three or four spots of a league year after year, but they can still win a league any given year if they have a few fortuitous breaks.
I would argue that another reason for the popularity of fantasy sports is the length of the game. While there are shorter form variants, most fantasy leagues last for the duration of the regular season of their sport. So, for example, baseball leagues last six months, and football leagues last for four months. In a world filled with endless streams of trivia crack games and team deathmatches, winning a game that takes six months to play takes on much more significance. In a league of evenly matched players, it is rare for one person to finish more than one or two seasons in first place over the course of a decade. Wins and losses are much more memorable in this game format.
Another interesting aspect of fantasy sports is that they tend to exist outside of the communities that are typically associated with sports. As I mentioned above, it’s a game in which players fight over numbers. Despite the recent rise of a frat-boy image within fantasy football (exemplified in advertisements like this one: https://youtu.be/t58zxvlfOU0), fantasy sports have long been the domain of people who would rather play with Excel spreadsheets than a ball. Draper describes one of the earliest fantasy baseball communities existing among the faculty of the University of Michigan in the 1960’s, when the university’s “top social scientists were running regression analyses on baseball statistics in order to get an edge on the competition” (Draper, p. 12). In some cases, like my racing league, the players aren’t even particularly invested in the sport itself.
This is not to say that the majority of fantasy sports players are not interested in the corresponding professional sports. Quite the opposite, actually, most fantasy players are dedicated fans of a given sport, and fantasy games serve as a way to actively engage in their sport when that sport is not in season. Knowledge of things like young, up-and-coming players, marketplace dynamics, and game theory are beneficial to fantasy players, and they often use the offseason to spend time researching these aspects of the game. Some fantasy sports analysts (yes, that is a real job), like Jason Grey, formerly of ESPN.com, have parlayed their innovations in the field of fantasy analytics into jobs with professional sports teams.
Finally, I submit that the rise of fantasy sports has corresponded with a shift in the broader sports culture from emphasizing the teams to the players. This has mirrored changing power dynamics within the sports themselves, as tools like free agency have given the athletes more ability to determine the conditions under which they play. This agency has had the consequence, however, of limiting year-to-year continuity of the roster of a given sports team. Turnover in most team sports is well above twenty-five percent annually. In many sports, especially basketball, the individual players are more recognizable brands than the teams themselves.
Fantasy sports reflect this emphasis. The team an athlete plays for is essentially irrelevant in fantasy sports. While a fantasy player’s favorite professional team might acquire a hated rival player, he or she has complete control of the players on his or her fantasy team. The performance of those players often becomes more important than the wins or losses of any professional team.
Thus, fantasy sports seem to be a games befitting of sports spectatorship in the twenty-first century. Their focus on individuals instead of teams, day-to-day interaction within a months-long game, and elements of gambling have all contributed to their dramatic growth in popularity during recent years. It’s likely that this trend will continue, and that more and more people will keep tabs on the Campingworld.com 500 qualifying.