Fantasy Sports Research Articles

Identification of skill in an online game: The case of Fantasy Premier League.

In all competitions where results are based upon an individual's performance the question of whether the outcome is a consequence of skill or luck arises. We explore this question through an analysis of a large dataset of approximately one million contestants playing Fantasy Premier League, an online fantasy sport where managers choose players from the English football (soccer) league. We show that managers' ranks over multiple seasons are correlated and we analyse the actions taken by managers to increase their likelihood of success. The prime factors in determining a manager's success are found to be long-term planning and consistently good decision-making in the face of the noisy contests upon which this game is based. Similarities between managers' decisions over time that result in the emergence of 'template' teams, suggesting a form of herding dynamics taking place within the game, are also observed. Taken together, these findings indicate common strategic considerations and consensus among successful managers on crucial decision points over an extended temporal period.

Fantasy Football and the Discourse Surrounding Violence against Women

The discourse surrounding professional football players and violence against women developed alongside an evolving NFL that increasingly valued fantasy sports participants for their heightened engagement and investment. Fantasy-specific sports information companies emerged to equip fantasy ‘owners’ with information and advice to best manage their virtual rosters, including strategies for navigating players’ legal troubles and possible suspensions. The NFL has faced significant criticism for its response to cases involving domestic violence and sexual assault, but fantasy football’s role in containing this perceived crisis has received less attention. Analysing fantasy sports from a historical perspective reveals the ways in which fans have been compelled to think through (or gloss over) these issues. Specifically, fantasy football advice on the popular fantasy sports website Rotoworld from 2003 to 2013 reveals a pattern of reimagining real-world violence, and particularly violence against women, as a problem that can be understood and activated purely in terms of fantasy sports. Reducing the costs of this violence to the world of virtual gameplay discourages social consciousness, diminishes the capacity for productive dialogue, and erases the lived experience of survivors.

Communication as Commodity Exchange: Mapping the Media Ecology of Fantasy Sport

This research applies an ecological lens to examine how ‘media’ impacts both fantasy sport and the stock market through the translation of statistical data by way of new technologies. The core content offered rarely changes (e.g. sport statistics, stock market prices) but can be altered, so attention is on the medium itself and how it fits into the spectacle of consumption and becomes an extension of human consciousness. The conversion of on-field performance to numerical point values in the fantasy space created an analytical and gestured language, shifting emphasis from team performance to player performance and transforming players into numerical possessions to be acquired, manipulated, and potentially sold or transferred. The Internet provided an asynchronous and interactive application that signaled a demassification of relevant information and created a centralized ‘global village’ of fantasy sport participation. In this process of relinquishing control, the fantasy sport participant is commodified in a statistical space through the consuming of information. The statistical language at the root of fantasy sport tapped a deep well of information once tangibly useless to sport fans, and through its manipulation and analytical conversion created a socially-meaningful industry.

Growing in Tandem with Media: Fantasy Sport, Media Use, and the Formation of an Industry Giant

The growth in sports media, both in the number and quality of content options, is surpassed only by the escalation of fantasy sport participants, moving from niche to mainstream over a relatively short time. This essay tracks the paths of both sport media and fantasy industry growth, arguing that the symbiotic relationship between the two has facilitated growth that could not have been accomplished without the presence of both.

Expert Analysis: The Reciprocal Relationship between Sports Gambling and Fantasy Football on Television

Television coverage of football gambling established the industrial preconditions within sports media for fantasy sports coverage to emerge and proliferate. Coverage of gambling and fantasy sport encourages active, dedicated consumptive behaviour and participation from audiences. The popularization of content devoted to these activities illuminates key tensions marking the discourses around both sports betting and fantasy football since leagues like the NFL have distanced themselves from gambling. Nonetheless, paratextual television programmes dedicated to sports gambling developed the discursive frameworks that define sports betting and fantasy football as skill- and research-based pastimes. Gambling experts, especially Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder, facilitated the emergence of contemporary ‘fantasy gurus’ like ESPN’s Matthew Berry. These on-air experts brand themselves through a particular combination of statistical analysis, commentary, and humor. Both Snyder and Berry analyze statistical data and trends to offer viewers reasons to put specific players in weekly fantasy lineups or bet a certain way. Historically, sports betting and fantasy football programmes have had a mutually-beneficial relationship with media industries. This relationship reveals the process by which marginal forms of sports media can move from the periphery to the center of fan culture.

Nationality-Based Prejudice in Sports: Fan Demand for Foreign Athletes in the Czech Republic

Abstract: This paper aims to answer the question of whether fans discriminate against foreign athletes. It uses data from the fantasy sports environment. The sample consists of 11 rounds in the football competition in Czechia during the 2015–2016 season. A total of 8,036 people participated in the game, and they completed a total of 53,951 squads. The final dataset consists of 3,741 observations of a specific footballer in a single round. The results show that Czech fantasy sports users prefer domestic players. The influence of the players’ origin varies depending on the region they are from. The results show that Asian and Eastern European countries, namely Croatia, Serbia, and Slovakia, present a negative influence. On the other hand, Czechs prefer players from South America and Russia. In the case of African and Western European countries, the influence is insignificant in the models. Performance, however, influences the demand for athletes the most.

Productive play: The shift from responsible consumption to responsible production

Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and reconfigured by digital mediation. The case study of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) illustrates a contemporary challenge to rigid dichotomies between game/not game, skilled/unskilled play, and game/gambling game, demonstrating how regulation becomes deterritorialized as gambling moves out of state-regulated physical casinos and takes the form of networked, digital games. Our second case study of Pokémon Go approaches regulation from a different direction, complicating the rigid dichotomy between production/consumption in online networked play. We show how play is increasingly realized as productive in economic, social, physical, subjective and analytic registers, while at the same time, it is driven by gambling design imperatives, such as extending time-on-device. Pokémon Go exemplifies analytic productivity, a term we use to refer to the production of data flows that can be leveraged for a wide variety of purposes, including to predict, shape, and channel the behaviour of player populations, thereby generating multiple streams of revenue. Ultimately, both cases illustrate how digital games and gambling increasingly blur into each other, complicating the regulatory landscape.

Book Review: Whose Game? Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports, by Rebecca Joyce Kissane and Sarah Winslow

Book Review: <i>Whose Game? Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports</i>, by Rebecca Joyce Kissane and Sarah Winslow

Review of Whose Game? Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports

Reviewer: Tristan Bridges, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA I knew little about fantasy sports leagues before reading Kissane and Winslow’s multi-method analysis of participants in fantasy sports. In Whose Game? Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports, Kissane and Winslow examine the ways that gender, race, and class shape the structure and experience of fantasy sports participation in ways that reproduce an intersectional array of inequalities under the guise of “good fun.” Their central argument is that fantasy sports matter and are more than an insignificant pastime. They show how diverse forms of identity and inequality are policed and maintained in ways that allow women to participate, but work to (re) situate them as outsiders within the world of fantasy sports. One of the elements of the book that I enjoyed a great deal is that it is a sociological study of something I think many assume to be...

Fantasy Sports in Australia: Co-Regulation and Commercial Accommodation

Modern, commercial fantasy sports came to Australia in 2001. It has since grown into a significant and accepted part of the Australian sporting and gambling landscape. Fantasy sports’ mainstreaming has been relatively uncontroversial. It has found its place within Australia’s regulatory regimes absent the controversy and disputes that has plagued it in the United States. Its operators have been licensed and there have been no significant challenges to the products they offer. This is not to say that fantasy sports are without their regulatory and legal issues in Australia. On the contrary, such issues abound. These range from how fantasy sports should be regulated and its integrity ensured, to the nature, ownership and protection of the intellectual property and other rights upon which fantasy sports depend for their success. This article explores these issues and the manner of their resolution. This examination reveals a regulatory environment that co-opts sport governing bodies as co- or quasi-regulators of gambling on the sports they administer, which position they have leveraged to reach commercial accommodations with fantasy sport operators, thereby creating a stable environment in which both share in the revenues it generates.

Recruiting Women to a Male-Dominated Activity: A Case Study of Women’s Nonparticipation in Fantasy Sport

Fantasy Sports Collection, Inc. (FSC) is a fantasy sport organization offering fantasy play since 2005. Having plateaued in consumer growth, FSC is faced with difficult financial decisions. In a brainstorming session regarding new initiatives, Molly Brinkmeyer suggested an idea to purposefully market to and recruit more women to preestablished offerings. Molly’s reasons driving this idea were the fact that only 14% of their consumers were women and, after an evaluation of FSC’s marketing campaigns, employees of FSC quickly saw that advertisements were overtly produced for men. FSC’s management team felt that this was an idea worth pursuing. They charged Molly with acquiring information about women’s fantasy sport participation and gave her a 3-week window to learn more and report back. She found that women’s top perceptions of the activity were that: (a) the activity was time consuming; (b) the activity required research, surveillance, and information; (c) they had no interest or understanding of it; (d) they felt the activity was too competitive; (e) they thought it wasn’t real; and (f) they still had a positive opinion of fantasy sport. With this new information, marketing decisions could now be made to address existing concerns by women regarding fantasy sport participation.

SPORTS MARKET AS A DATA SOURCE FOR ECONOMICS: WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON BETTING AND FANTASY SPORTS

Data collection for verification of economic models is often not easy. Data coming from laboratories can be distorted in comparison to data from the real environment. The sports environment offers an interesting source of data for research not only on the field of labour economics, thanks to its extensive records of performance, wages, and market prices of individual athletes. Sports betting and fantasy sports further extend this potential towards consumers. Data from this environment allow better recognition of the users? preferences, rational behaviour, or heuristics. This paper offers an outlining of the current state of economics focused on the use of the sports environment in research and shows some of the possibilities presented by sports betting and fantasy sports. As an example of that, the over-selection of athletes from the historically dominant teams in the fantasy league according to the Czech football competition in the season 2015-16 is investigated in the applied section. The results show the impact of this heuristic on the users? decision-making.

Supplemental Material for A Large-Scale Prospective Study of Big Wins and Their Relationship with Future Financial and Time Involvement in Actual Daily Fantasy Sports Contests

Supplemental Material for A Large-Scale Prospective Study of Big Wins and Their Relationship with Future Financial and Time Involvement in Actual Daily Fantasy Sports Contests

Market Efficiency and the Setting of Salaries for NBA Daily Fantasy on FanDuel and Draft Kings

The market for daily fantasy sports for the NBA is examined with respect to efficiency when pricing player salaries for the games. Simple factors such as home court advantage, rest, and opponent are shown to significantly effect performance beyond posted salaries in the respective markets. In addition, a “hot hand” effect is found in that players that exceed expectations in previous games are shown to outperform salary-based expectations in the next contest. These factors yield a rejection of market efficiency as it relates to salaries in the marketplace. Legal ramifications for these contests as games of skill are examined.

Fantasy Sports as Markers of a New Collective Identity and a Motivation to Participation in Social Activities (Mainly for Men)

By analyzing the responses of 1075 fantasy sports players, the paper highlights the differences among players of the four leading North American team sports of football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. Motivations for participation vary in each of these sports. Whereas the study confirms that fantasy football is the most prominent among the four, it also highlights key characteristics that define fantasy baseball, basketball, and hockey players. In particular, the study demonstrates that for fantasy football players the main driving force in their participation centers on general sociability, a form of cultural capital and shared connection that is common among friends at the bar and the office. In contrast, for fantasy hockey players, participation in the game is more about reinforcement within their group, a solidification among a self-selected and devoted cluster of fantasy hockey players that revels in its confined, almost cult-like, associativity.

Optimising Daily Fantasy Sports Teams with Artificial Intelligence

Abstract This paper outlines a novel approach to optimising teams for Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) contests. To this end, we propose a number of new models and algorithms to solve the team formation problems posed by DFS. Specifically, we focus on the National Football League (NFL) and predict the performance of real-world players to form the optimal fantasy team using mixed-integer programming. We test our solutions using real-world data-sets from across four seasons (2014-2017). We highlight the advantage that can be gained from using our machine-based methods and show that our solutions outperform existing benchmarks, turning a profit in up to 81.3% of DFS game-weeks over a season.

A Swiftly Changing Tide: Fantasy Sport, Gambling, and Alternative Forms of Participation

The fantasy sport industry has seen tremendous changes in the past five years, thanks in large part to increased participation, media acceptance, easing of legal pressure, and the proliferation of daily fantasy sport. Similarly, sports gambling recently moved further into the spotlight with a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a 1992 law allowing Nevada to be the only state to legally house sports betting. Having once been advised to steer clear of each other, gambling and fantasy sport interests are now becoming increasingly intertwined. Utilizing quantitative data from a national survey of 519 fantasy sport participants, this study explores attitudes of and participation in alternative forms of fantasy sport and sports betting. Insights can be gleaned regarding familiarity in the activities, reluctance in participation, sport consumption, future participation, and connection points between fantasy sport and sports gambling cultures.

Just a Fantasy? Examining Fantasy Sport in a Time Without Sport

The fantasy sport industry has seen tremendous growth over the past three decades. Estimated at 500,000 participants in 1988, the industry has had positive growth every step of the way to a current estimate of 59.3 million North American participants. Touting this incredible rise in participation, nothing has obstructed the growth of this sport media and communication phenomenon until now. The sport landscape and fantasy sport industry find themselves in a situation with complete absence of live sport. The Coronavirus crisis has impacted the fantasy sport community and thousands of professionals in many ways. This research commentary, supplemented with primary interview data, questions the stoppage of fantasy sport and explores conversations, planning, and reaction from the fantasy sport community.

Examining the Impact of Fantasy Sport Participation and Fan Identification on Player Performance and Brand Image Perceptions

Abstract: Along with the growth of fantasy sport has come a slew of research on how participation in the activity affects traditional fan behavior. The current study extends this line of literature by investigating how participation in fantasy sport impacts fans’ perceptions of players. Specifically, through an application of cognitive miser theory, we argue that fantasy sport participants, as well as highly identified fans, are susceptible to a fantasy judgment bias, wherein players are assessed more from the perspective of their fantasy sport performance than actual on-field performance. Using MANCOVA on fan survey responses concerning two recent NFL players, we show that this bias exists and that it impacts the brand associations fans make with regard to athletes as well as their purchase intentions toward these athletes. Finally, SEM was used to investigate which fantasy sport participation motives are most salient to the existence of the phenomenon.

Fantasy Sport Usage and Multiplatform Sport Media Consumption Behaviors

Abstract: Previous research suggests that fantasy sport users are avid sport fans and therefore consume more content from media. With a rapidly changing media environment and consumers’ viewing habits, this study sought to investigate the role of playing fantasy sport on sport media consumption across both traditional and new media platforms as well as the type of social media usage before, during, and after the sporting event. Data from a national consumer panel representative of the US adult population ( N = 615) showed that fantasy sport consumption enhances the level of media consumption across platforms in general, except for legacy media such as television and newspaper. Research further showed that Twitter, YouTube, and website/blog use before, during, and after the event are robust predictors of fantasy sport consumption while Facebook use is not associated with fantasy sport consumption at all.