Fantasy Sports and their effect on fans
As I touched on in my video experiment about fantasy leagues, sports fans found many ways to immerse themselves favorite pastime. They collected trading cards, played the sport recreationally, or played video games. Before the advent of fantasy sports, and even now, fans often complain about decisions that players, coaches and general managers make about the team. They think they can do a better job than the people they follow. Enter fantasy sports.
As mentioned at the end of the video experiment summary, ESPN aired a 30 for 30 documentary on the origins of fantasy sports. The film, titled Silly Little Game, looks at the origins of Rotisserie League Baseball. “For us, it wasn’t enough to just watch baseball or study it in the box scores,” said Daniel Okrent, inventor of Rotisserie league baseball. “We all wished in some way to possess it, to control it.”
A 2007 journal article written by Lee K. Farquhar and Robert Meeds stated that over 15 million people participate in online fantasy sports leagues. In many ways, fantasy sports changes how fans watch the sport they love. Additionally, the lucrative business of it has altered how sports in question present their information. They also led to the creation of daily fantasy leagues that serve to separate people from their money.
The article says there are primarily two types of fantasy sports users. The first type is very much involved in the process. This person tends to enjoy the trill that comes with winning. This feeling is not exclusive to fantasy sports, but the article seems to say that the player takes pride in outsmarting their opponent. That makes sense, the whole point of fantasy sports is using player evaluation and some strategy to beat your competition. On the other side, player was not as involved and sought general bragging rights. Among the traits of lax fantasy participants, forgetting to set lineups or using auto-draft instead of taking a hands on approach. This sort of thing tends to be more prevalent in free leagues where no money is on the line.
Fantasy sports can also change the way people cheer for teams if they do at all. Instead of cheering for teams, fantasy player may instead cheer for specific players on their team.
In Dominic Boyer’s The Life Informatic, he spends a day working at an Associated Press branch in Germany. While there, he examines the work of the “slotters”, who spend most of their day combing through news stories on multiple screens determining what to write. Fantasy sports users tend to do the same. They can watch the game on TV while checking player stats on their phones or laptops. For the players who really take it seriously, they will constantly check online injury reports so they can set their lineups accordingly.
Fantasy sports gives fans a different way to interact with the events they enjoy I wonder if it has an effect on dwindling attendance in leagues like the NFL (there are other reasons, cold weather, questionable fan behavior, etc.) and subsequent price hikes.
