Fantasy sport: what it is, why it is, and how it affects real life

When CSKA beat Perm Amkar in the first round of the current Russian championship, the main character of the match was defender Sergei Ignashevich, who scored both goals in the match. Few people knew at that moment, however, that, to the joy of Sergey, slight annoyance mixed in: he did not have time to put himself as a captain in his fantasy team and lost 18 points. The defender found out too late that his partner Doumbia would not play at the base, and managed to get to the laptop only at 13:06, while the last permutations could be done an hour before the match. Later Sergey spoke about the achievements and principles of the formation of his Ignashevich team on his personal website and his blog on Sports.ru.

As you probably already understood, the point of fantasy football is to make up a virtual team of real players and get points for their useful actions in real games, competing with other virtual teams. We want to talk a little bit about why the players of the Russian national team less than an hour before the real matches think about some games on the Internet, where this game came from and how it develops in the world and in our Sports.ru.

The world of fantasy games began with baseball: in 1960, sociology professor William Gamson first organized the so-called “Baseball Workshop”, during which participants collected compositions on paper from real players and competed in the sum of places according to different parameters. In 1980, editor Daniel Okrent, who once learned about the game from one of the participants in the Gemson seminar, came up with detailed rules for the new game, which he called the Rotisserie League Baseball. Okrent had many friends in the world of sports journalism, who soon took a great interest in new entertainment. Already in July of the same year, the New York Times wrote about fantasy baseball, then columns appeared on the nuances of the game (during a baseball strike in 1981, sports columnists had to think up some topics for articles), and soon books were published and sold. branded kits for the game. By 1988, 500,000 people in all kinds of fantasy sports were already playing in the USA alone, by 1994 their number had reached 3 million. In 1993, a weekly fantasy baseball column appeared in the national newspaper USA Today.

And then the Internet appeared - and already in 1997, the fantasy gaming industry reached a new level with the advent of Commissioner.com, a site that offered real-time data updates, a system of closed leagues with its own discussion platforms and detailed statistics. Soon the Internet giant Yahoo entered the market, then the most successful independent start-ups were bought for tens of millions, having successfully survived even the dot-com bubble in 2001.
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Now with ESPN, CBS and Yahoo! Sports, the largest American sports internet player, has entire fantasy divisions. On Yahoo! There are more than a dozen bloggers and reviewers in five types of fantasy sports, there is even a “Senior director of fantasy” position on ESPN. No wonder: the size of the US market is estimated at 3-4 billion dollars. According to the FSTA , a fantasy sports trade association, in the United States and Canada, 32 million people play fantasy games. This is not only students and schoolchildren - according to the same study, people with permanent jobs and higher education play fantasy games two times more often than others. They willingly pay money: for programs for researching data, for additional statistics, for taking part in totalizator leagues with cash prizes. Sports leagues also have their own interest in fantasy: according to NFL research, fantasy players watch sports one and a half times more often; Moreover, the anxious expectation of the success of "one's own" player can add additional interest even to the most ordinary game.

The fantasy version of European football (generally similar to what you see on the right in the picture) was invented in Italy in 1990, existed for a while in a newspaper variant (the largest Belarusian sports newspaper "Pressball" arranged a large-scale version of fantasy football for correspondence) and with the advent of the Internet version also grew to millions of participants (the official fantasy football of the English Premier League remains the most popular). In Russia, fantasy football appeared somewhere in the mid-2000s on small sites, and in 2009, Sports.ru became the first of the major participants in the Russian sports Internet to launch its own fantasy (soon enough, it should be noted, this idea came to mind our competitors).

We invested a lot of energy into advertising new entertainment, telling players and coaches about it and making up teams with them, and the results did not keep us waiting for some time - the same Ignashevich, which was told at the beginning of the text, started a team without or tips from our side. Of course, the game found a response among sports journalists, in particular, NTV + commentators, who organized their own league and occasionally talk about the successes of their teams in the broadcasts. Fantasy-sport has not quite entered the Russian sports culture yet, but we are striving for this - not only because it is fun, exciting and curious, but also because it adds interest to the championships, makes it more attentive to follow the sport and better in it to understand. Now on Sports.ru only in fantasy football (there is also hockey , basketball , biathlon and Formula 1 ) 59 thousand people participate, gathered 154 thousand active teams (closer to the beginning of the season this figure, according to last year’s experience, will grow far beyond 200 thousand). The engine of our fantasy is based on data from external providers of statistics, is fully automated and allows you to connect all new and new tournaments when there is interest (this year, for example, we launched tournaments in the championships of Portugal, Turkey and the English second division , we also have a unique kind of fantasy tournament on the championship of Belarus ).

Inveterate fantasy-gamers all the time have a desire to extend the idea to something else (in the USA there was an online game in fantasy congress, where you had to recruit senators and follow their progress, on slon.ru there is principles of the game " Oligarchs ", there is a community of fans of fantasy- "What? Where? When?") and come up with some new options for the game. The model of fantasy sport is good because it allows you to try out some ideas manually and, if successful, make a full-fledged interface for them. For example, just the other day, users had an idea to arrange so-called h2h-leagues on Sports.ru, where each tour team competes with a specific rival team - the idea was actively supported by more than 120 people , including all recognized masters. Most likely, by the next season we will be implementing the h2h leagues in a full-fledged way. There has long been a blog for players in fantasy-tennis, though not yet very popular - if the game becomes more popular, we will get to it.

If for some reason you wanted to create your team in one of our fantasy tournaments, read the short rules and choose your own tournament to your taste . If you have any questions, ideas or suggestions, we will be happy to talk in the comments.