Announcing Playmaker
“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”
Bill Shankly, Liverpool Manager 1959–1974.
Playing fantasy sports (specifically Fantasy Premier League “FPL”) has been my main hobby for the last 10 years. This is probably not that surprising to those of you who know me, considering it consists of two of my favourite activities: watching sports and analysing data.
I also happen to be reasonably good at it, ranking around 1,000th out of 7 million+ FPL Managers over the last 10 years.
At the end of 2018, my interest hit an all-time high and knowing that a number of my friends in the tech world also played, I decided to set up a secondary Twitter account where I would only talk about FPL.
I expected around 10 of my tech Twitter friends to follow my dedicated FPL account and I was right with my estimation. What I severely underestimated though was the number of people just as dedicated to the game as me.
A year later, I am about to pass the 20,000 followers mark…..
So, how did this happen and who are all these people following me?
They’re the “FPL community”, a self-titled community consisting of hardcore FPL players who spend an incredible amount of time per week agonising and discussing every piece of information that could be used to be better at the game or simply to just enjoy it more.
A community of people just like me.
From fantasy to reality
Discovering all these people that are as passionate about the game as me, meant I started to daydream about whether I could play FPL full-time. I started to ponder:
People play video games for a living these days, so why not fantasy sports?
This daydream was short-lived though as I quickly realised that there is no real opportunity to do this for a living.
Despite over 200 million people playing fantasy sports globally each year (a number increasing year on year), there is zero professional infrastructure.
There’s no dedicated platform and no way to build or own identity or grow a centralised following as a fantasy manager.
Today, the fantasy sports ecosystem is fragmented across forums, subreddits, Twitter, Slack, and YouTube accounts. Even the games themselves don’t tend to think about their community of players, let alone try to serve them.
Being the ambitious person I am, I reframed the question. Instead of asking myself whether I could play FPL full-time, I asked myself:
“What if it could be possible for anyone to do so?”
With that, I called Helder (who I’ve worked with on multiple projects over the last six years) and a week later we founded Playmaker. We were joined by two very talented engineers (👋🏻 Aksel and Anders) and we’re now a full-time team of 4.
What we are building
Playmaker is a dedicated place to discuss fantasy sports, enabling fantasy managers to own their identity and grow their following.
On Playmaker you:
- Own your identity as a Fantasy Manager with a purpose-made profile designed to help you grow your following.
- Follow the highs and lows of a matchday in our live chat powered by Opta data, where Fantasy Managers can react to the key events as they happen.
- Have a centralised place to talk fantasy with a unique discussion structure designed to help Fantasy Managers make better decisions.
Our vision
We want to make it possible for Fantasy Managers to earn money by playing fantasy sports. Whether it’s by monetising your following or by competing for prize pools (coming in the 2020/21 season), with Playmaker you’ll get paid to play fantasy sports. In the not so distant future, we want Fantasy Managers to earn enough money that playing fantasy sports full-time is possible, much in the same way that eSports made it possible for gamers to make a living.
While we are initially starting with one game (“FPL” played by 7 million+ people every year and growing) we will replicate this format across all of the major fantasy games, making it possible for any fantasy manager, no matter the game, to build a following and earn a living from playing fantasy sports.
Our longer-term vision is for fantasy sports to replace sports betting as the primary way to increase the enjoyment of live sports.
What’s next
Today we are officially coming out of stealth and opening up our waitlist for our beta which will launch in April. In addition, we are reaching out to some of the best FPL Managers around to become our alpha users, before our public launch in July ahead of the 2020/2021 (Premier League) season.
We’re lucky to be supported by a group of angel investors that share our vision of providing fantasy sports managers the community platform and opportunities they deserve. Our investors are a mixture of fantasy sports enthusiasts, individuals who were instrumental in the rise of eSports into the mainstream and experienced consumer tech angels.
We’re grateful to them for helping us go after this opportunity, we’ll now make it possible for fantasy managers to go after theirs.
(You can read more and sign up to our beta here)
Thanks to Christian Jantzen for reviewing a draft of this post and to Kaja Kirstine Lilleng both for her help with this post and with our communications.
