Fantasy sports have become a huge part of the sports market in recent years. You have daily leagues, weekly leagues, and betting leagues. You have leagues for football, hockey, baseball, basketball, NASCAR, and golf. These leagues began back in the late 1970s early 1980s and primarily focused on the sport of baseball. It was first primarily done by the media before it grew into something that upwards of 3 million people participated in during the 1994 baseball season. Fantasy football was the next to join in on the game and was founded in 1987 and started to take off in 1999. Fantasy sports got a huge boost when the internet became more common in homes and the first sport to join was hockey. Hockey followed the success of fantasy baseball and football and the first fantasy hockey league was formed in the mid-90s. Fantasy football dominates the fantasy marketplace currently as fantasy football is the only fantasy sport that has a whole show dedicated to it.
From my own experience, fantasy sports have been one of the best things that the internet has done for the better of the actual sports. Now I am not going to say that my knowledge of sports can be attributed primarily to playing fantasy sports. However, I will argue that before I started playing fantasy sports I didn’t know as much about them as I do now. Before when watching SportsCenter, I would mainly focus on the highlights that dealt primarily with my teams and whatever news, like trades and injuries, for whatever leagues those teams were in. Fantasy sports require more than a basic knowledge of the sport because not only do you need to know who the star players are, you also need to know about the guys that you may not always hear get called because they are more of role players than stars. In addition, you can’t just limit yourself to the knowledge of your team and the rivals that you play; but rather, you also must know about the players on other teams and the impact that they have on those teams. Lastly, when playing fantasy, you must make sure that you keep up with the health of players and how their seasons are going because one day a guy might be healthy and the next day he’s not or he could be facing a tough matchup that could hurt your fantasy chances. All this new information often means that you follow a sport more closely and gain a better understanding of the nuances of the game.
Fantasy sports are great for someone who is looking to grow their knowledge in any sport because to play, there are a variety of new roles that a person must take on as a fan. Many consider this knowledge to be trivial, and for some it is, but this is a great way for people to bond with others that have common interests. In addition, it is a great way to get a little competition going in between friends that sometimes end with tattoos you don’t want or doing something funny, yet embarrassing for the person who finishes in last that create great stories for other fans. Fantasy sports overall have grown the “market share” of sports in everyday life and will continue to do so as long as the product on the field is worth watching.
