Fantasy Sports

The Rise of Fantasy Sports

Fantasy sports (also known as rotisserie, or roto) refer to games where fantasy owners build a team that competes against other fantasy owners based on the statistics generated by individual players or teams of a professional sport. Statistics cover practically any kind of sport now as sports recorders religiously note down every kind of action coming from the opposing players. Thus in boxing for example, the jabs and straights thrown by a boxer are recorded as to the number of times such punches are thrown. Statistically the more punches a boxer throws at his opponent, the greater is his chance of winning the bout.

The same is true with other games of sports. In basketball the more there are attempts of players on one team at throwing ring shots, the more are the chances of that team winning the game. Just the preponderance of the shots spells oftentimes victory for the team. Statistics is a game of numbers and when applied to sports the outcome of any game becomes quite predictable. It was because of these sports statistics that fantasy sports came into being. The fantasy team owners who have won statistically in the fantasy sports games become popular with the sports fans and their businesses are enhanced just by their sponsorship of fantasy sports groups.
Fantasy sports players become famous because they happen to play with the statistics that were built up from previous actual games and they fantasize that they are the top players in the games. Since spectator sports are quite popular with all ages, especially now that most sports leagues are widely covered with all the modern means of communication, fantasy sports have become big business as an entertainment for people.

It was estimated that 29.9 million people age 12 and above in the U.S. and Canada played fantasy sports in the year 2007 alone. This figure has been steadily growing with the advent of the Internet which has made very much easier the passing around of statistics covering various fantasy sports activities. This has also become big business – fantasy sports now are estimated to have a $3-$4 Billion annual economic impact across the sports industry. Fantasy sports are also now popular throughout the world with leagues for soccer, Australian-rules football, cricket and other non-U.S. based sports.

The concept of picking players and running a contest based on their year-to-date statistics has been around since shortly after World War II, but was never organized into a widespread hobby or formal business until just in the past decade and a half. Maybe it was because of the absence then of the fast communication tools that we have now that the development of fantasy sports was a bit slow in the beginning.
The turning point in the development of fantasy sports came with the development of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980. A magazine writer/editor named Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing it, with the name of the sport coming from the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise where he and some friends used to meet and play. The owners in a Rotisserie league would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players and would follow their statistics during the ongoing season to compile their scores. This was then used to make similar predictions about players' playing time, health, and expected performance that real baseball managers must make.
In the few years after Okrent helped popularize fantasy baseball as among the first of the fantasy sports, many people have since then been participating in the growing hobby and the growing entertainment business. Fantasy sports have since spread to other kinds of games following the huge success of fantasy baseball.

Baseball being a most popular sport in America, if not the most popular, naturally has become a first among the fantasy sports that was developed. The major baseball leagues are always top entertainment for all ages when they are played on international TV and so has fantasy baseball been such a favorite among the sports spectators. Many authors have made money just writing books explaining the new craze among sports audiences.

But it wasn't just baseball that saw new businesses and growth as a fantasy sport. Fantasy Football Index became the first annual fantasy football guide in 1987, this time for the game of football. Football is also as popular as baseball, so stats covering the many football matches and major football tournaments have received equal attention from the statistics developers, and led to the growing popularity too of fantasy football.

The Fantasy Sports Magazine debuted in 1989 as the first regular publication covering more than one fantasy sport. As the “fantasy” types of games picked up in the gate receipts (and now on pay per view TV too) many sports entrepreneurs have taken to investing in the promotion of fantasy sports events. So, over the past decade or so what started as a hobby way back (sports fantasy) continued to grow with 1 million to 3 million playing from 1991 to 1994.

But the big change for the growth of fantasy sports was the coming of the Internet in the mid-1990s. The new technology lowered the barrier for many people to enter into the hobby as stats on various games could quickly be compiled online and news and information became readily available, even to the entire world.

While several fantasy businesses had migrated to the internet in the mid-1990s, the most significant moment for online fantasy sports was in 1997 when two web sites made their debut that forever changed the fantasy sports industry – Commissioner.com and RotoNews.com.
Commissioner.com was launched on January 1, 1997 and was the first to offer a fantasy baseball commissioner service that changed the nature of fantasy sports with real-time statistics, league message boards, daily updated box scores and other features -- all for just $300 per league.

Commissioner.com was sold to another company, Sportsline, two years later (late in 1999) for $31 million in cash and stocks in a watershed moment for the fantasy sports industry. The sale proved to everyone that fantasy sports had grown from a mere hobby to big business.