Rediscovering the Roots of Fantasy Sports 一 A must read for all the fans!
Have you ever wondered where it all began? This article is all about knowing the history of fantasy sports. How it originated, how it flourished, everything until where it is now! Present day fantasy sports is quite modern in terms of everything. But was the case similar even back then? Can you even guess when did it all start? We are sure as you read through the article, you’ll find some very interesting and not-so-known facts about fantasy sports. So sit back, brew your coffee and enjoy the read!
Did you know fantasy sports came about shortly after the World War II? Wilfred “Bill” Winkenbach is the founding father of Fantasy Sports. He devised fantasy golf in 1950s. The idea was that each player selected a team of professional folders and the person with lowest combined total of strokes at the end of the tournament would win. Record keeping wasn’t complicated back then because everything was recorded on tabs. In New York’s Milford Plaza Hotel, in 1962, Winkenbach created rules for fantasy football. In 1963, fantasy football league named Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL) was started.
Let’s see how did fantasy baseball came into being. The first ever reported fantasy baseball league was from Boston, USA in 1960. The prestigious Harvard University sociologist William Gamson was responsible for starting a Baseball seminar where his colleagues kept records of the games and earned points on players’ final standings. Gamson later brought the idea with him to the University of Michigan where some professors played the game.
The eighties was the time for fantasy baseball. Although around 1984, Cliff Charpentier and Tom Kane Jr. came up with “The Fantasy Football Digest” in which they enumerated regulations pertaining to fantasy football. In 1980s, the Rotisserie scoring system was developed by some journalists for fantasy baseball. The system is named after the restaurant where the journalists rendezvoused and played the first ever La Rotisserie Française. The lead member was Daniel Okrent. In the system, the players would pick their own team from a list of ongoing baseball leagues and would follow the games dedicatedly based on statistics and after the season they used to compile player’s performance based on which people lost and won points.
There was a blow in 1981 when the Major League Baseball had a strike which turned out to be revolutionary for fantasy baseball. This meant that many sports journalists had very little to write about. So what did they decide to write about? You guessed it — the game they had come to love and play amongst their journalist friends — Fantasy Baseball!
And would you believe, by 1989 more than 1 million people in the USA were playing fantasy sports. By the 1980s, there had been significant advent of Internet and more sophisticated computers which changed the fantasy sports industry forever! After the internet boom, every industry had been affected in some way or the other. Fantasy sports was no exception to this and thanks to internet, fantasy sports’ popularity skyrocketed.
In 1999, Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) was launched and fantasy sports was put well on the way to becoming the billion-dollar industry it currently is. Another major happening took place In July of 1999. Yahoo! Inc. entered the market of fantasy sports and decided to set up a Fantasy sports system that was free to use. This was unusual as every other fantasy sports league in existence had a cost associated with playing. By 2006, 12 million people started playing fantasy sports! In 2009, FanDuel was formed and in 2011, Draft Kings joined the market. By 2013, 16 million people started to play fantasy sports.
When such a huge mass got attracted to fantasy sports, the television industry started to talk about fantasy sports. Fantasy Sports in itself gave a lot of business to the TV. By 2002, we saw TV commercials of fantasy football. They were broadcasted by National Football League (NFL). DirecTV announce a new addition to the NFL Sunday Ticket package called “Fantasy Zone”. This addition will show how all the current live action is affecting the fantasy stats for the day. Game to game analysis and an on screen ticker offering key player updates.
This lead to the fact that: Over 41.5 Million US & Canadian Citizens play fantasy sports today!
And now sports channels like ESPN broadcast shows related to fantasy sports exclusively. There are prime times, magazines devoted to fantasy sports. Now we are at a point where there are fantasy leagues for almost every sport under the sun. From football to car racing.
The same way landscape of fantasy sports and every other industry was changed because of internet, a similar disruption is being seen now by advent of technologies like blockchain and popularity of the idea of decentralised web. We do not know what the future holds but certainly there would be a paradigm shift from centralisation to decentralisation which would take place through blockchain as a medium. MyDFS is leading the movement of blockchain revolution in fantasy sports by incorporating modern day technology of Ethereum smart contracts into their system. Such an initiative would attract more number of people from different continents, not just America.
