fantasy sport

fantasy sport, any of a number of games that permit a person to play either a virtual game or a virtual season of a sport. In fantasy sports, the fans pose as both general manager and field manager of their team, building a roster through a draft and trades and making lineups in pursuit of the greatest statistical production. The two most-prominent fantasy sports in the U.S.—where the majority of fantasy sports are played—are fantasy baseball and fantasy gridiron football.

Fantasy baseball

The first sport to be utilized for fantasy purposes was baseball, which is ideally suited to the principles of the game with its detailed yet accessible scorecards and its long statistical record. One of the earlier precursors of fantasy baseball was a board game, introduced in 1951 by entrepreneur Dick Seitz, known as APBA (American Professional Baseball Association). (APBA was itself predated by All-Star Baseball, which was introduced in 1941 but is considered too simplistic by many experts to count as a legitimate forebear to modern fantasy games.) A game similar to APBA called Strat-o-matic first appeared in the 1960s. Having purchased the APBA or Strat-o-matic board game, players annually ordered cards that listed the statistical data for the ballplayers from the prior season. A combination of data given on those cards and the rolling of dice determined the outcome of the player’s “at-bat” or turn. In the 1990s computerized versions of those games permitted the statistics for a season from any baseball league in the world to be programmed in, as well as those from past major league seasons. The cult status that APBA and Strat-o-matic garnered carried over to rotisserie baseball.

Rotisserie baseball was invented in 1980 by author Dan Okrent and a group of baseball-minded friends who regularly met at the Manhattan restaurant Le Rotisserie Francais. They formed the core of the first rotisserie league. Unlike APBA, which is based upon a prior season’s performance, rotisserie baseball and its later Internet-based fantasy variants are played during the course of the regular baseball season. Rotisserie baseball season begins with a player draft (sometimes done as an auction), with each team in the league selecting 23–27 players (with set quotas at each position) from major league rosters. The statistics that those players accumulate over the course of a season determine the winner of the rotisserie league. The statistics traditionally used in that game are batting average, home runs, runs scored, runs batted in, wins (pitching), saves, earned run average, and walks plus hits per innings pitched. As the season progresses, team managers can drop underperforming or injured players and acquire new ones.

What is now popularly called fantasy baseball developed from the rotisserie game and takes advantage of the capabilities of the Internet to share data with a dispersed group of people. Online fantasy baseball provides statistical management for small rotisserie leagues and offers large-scale leagues in which multiple teams may own the same player.

The popularity of fantasy baseball spawned a new industry of statistical services and publications that analyzed players from a fantasy perspective and offered team-management strategies. Moreover, the advent of advanced statistics—known as sabermetrics in baseball but common in all sports—during the late 20th century created both better-informed fantasy players and a greater array of statistics to use in fantasy scoring.

Fantasy gridiron football

Fantasy gridiron football emerged in 1962 when Bill Winkenbach, then part owner of the Oakland Raiders football team, gathered with some friends in a New York City hotel, and together they created the first fantasy football league, which was dubbed the GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League). The original concept was simple. The league members would “draft” actual National Football League (NFL) and American Football League (a rival professional football organization that merged with the NFL in 1970) players to their fantasy franchises, and, on the basis of the actual performance of those players in games, the members would accrue points and compete against each other.

The standard yearly fantasy football league consists of 10 or 12 teams and follows a common format. Each team has a weekly roster consisting of 12–16 spots and a starting lineup featuring a quarterback, one or two running backs, two wide receivers, a tight end, a flex (a running back or wide receiver), a kicker, and a team defense/special teams. A draft is held prior to the first week of the NFL regular season. The standard draft format is called a “snake draft,” in which round one proceeds with each of the teams in a league choosing one player in turn. Player selection in round two will then start with the team that picked last in the first round and end with the team that picked first in the first round. That alternates each round until all teams have drafted sufficient players to fill their respective rosters. After the draft, teams may make any number of adjustments to their rosters via trades with other teams in the league or via the waiver wire (claiming players not already on the roster of any team in one’s league).

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

The actual games start with week 1 of the NFL season and are usually scored as follows for the offensive players: six points for rushing and receiving touchdowns, four points for passing touchdowns, one point for every 25 yards passing, one point for every 10 yards rushing or receiving, two points for any two-point conversion, three points for a field goal, and one point for an extra point. The points accrued by team defenses/special teams typically vary widely from league to league.

In a standard season for a basic fantasy football league, beginning in week 1, each fantasy team is assigned a regular-season schedule consisting of one weekly head-to-head game. The team whose players produce more fantasy points over the course of the week’s games will get the win. The teams with the best records at the end of the regular season typically qualify for the play-offs, which often begin in week 14. In one of the simplest play-off schemes used, the teams with the top two records receive first-round byes, while the next four teams are paired off for the right to advance from the final four in week 15. Two teams advance in week 16 to the fantasy championship, the winner of which is crowned league champion. (Fantasy leagues usually do not play games in week 17, the final week of the NFL regular season, because NFL teams that have clinched a play-off spot are more apt to rest their star players, depriving certain fantasy teams of their best assets.)

As the game grew, many variations emerged in terms of scoring systems (most notably, leagues that add one point per reception made), league rules (such as auction leagues, wherein participants bid on players instead of using the snake draft, and keeper leagues, which allow participants to keep certain players on their roster from year to year), and season length. There are also fantasy football leagues that are based on college football and the Canadian Football League.

Other fantasy sports

With the proliferation of the Internet, many other fantasy sports grew in popularity worldwide. In addition to the more-common leagues involving team sports such as basketball and ice hockey, fantasy leagues that focused on individual sports such as golf and auto racing sprang up in the late 20th century. Although fantasy sports originated in the United States, they caught on in other countries too, particularly Canada and the United Kingdom, with fantasy hockey predominant in the former country and fantasy football (soccer) the most-popular game in the latter (primarily leagues that involve players from England’s Premier League). Other fantasy sports that caught on around the globe include tennis, cricket, and Australian rules football.

Fantasy sports have become big business, with the industry generating annual revenues in excess of $1 billion by the early 2010s. Almost all major sports media outlets—such as ESPN, Yahoo Sports, and Fox Sports—and numerous specialized Web sites host various fantasy games, including both free leagues and leagues that require payments to the site (and usually promise subsequent payouts if the participant wins). Fantasy sports are also prominent forums for gambling within the league, as many leagues require dues from each participant, with the pot being distributed to the league champion or among the top finishers at the end of a season.