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The Ultimate Fantasy, Profits

Sports fantasy games have grown steadily, but profits are a new game.

Forget who wins the kickoff of the football season. For many fans, the makeup of their fantasy football teams, which will be chosen in the next week, will be a much bigger deal. For those not among the estimated 15 million fantasy sports players, the idea is to select a group of real players for a fictional team, then use the real-life statistics of those players to determine which team in a fantasy league is doing the best. And as part of the league fee, there generally is a modest prize pool to be split by the top teams at the end of the season.

Fantasy sports started with a baseball league in 1980, with fantasy owners compiling weekly stats with various sports newspapers, such as Sporting News. The birth of the Internet gave rise to services that would quickly crunch the stats and send out standings via e-mail or post them on a Web site, giving the games explosive double-digit growth through most of the 1990s.

Despite its baseball roots, fantasy football has become the most popular version of the sport, with about 10 million participants according to one survey. That's slightly above the average number of households tuned into NFL games on CBS on an average Sunday last season.

Gaining fans -- and profits

What is new is that most of the stat services have finally started making money. Sports sites on the Web and fantasy services finally started charging players. And lo and behold, millions of fantasy players started to pay, without much objection. "The industry has finally realized people are willing to pay for stat service and the content if it's good enough," said Greg Ambrosius, president of Fantasy Sports Trade Association and editor of some of the fantasy draft guides. "No doubt the industry is much more stable business-wise because pay service has returned."

The free services found across the Internet in much of the 1990s have basically disappeared, Ambrosius said. Yahoo! is one of the only major free services still available, and even it offers premium services for leagues or individual team owners to add onto.

SportsLine.com, the only stand-alone publicly traded sports site with more than 80,000 leagues and more than a million individual fantasy leagues, saw its subscription and premium products revenue increase to $14.2 million last year from $4.3 million in 2001 as it started to charge for fantasy sports. That now represents 23 percent of its overall revenue.

Football leads the way

As in real life, fantasy football has passed fantasy baseball in popularity. But this is one area where football's popularity is helping baseball, as fantasy players explore different sports. "There is strong growth in the number of games that fantasy sports people are involved in," said Kim Beason, associate professor at the University of Mississippi, who has studied fantasy players' participation rates.

Watching what has become a billion-dollar industry with some sense of amazement is Dan Okrent, the writer who drafted the first fantasy baseball rules for himself and a group of friends before the 1980 baseball season. Okrent, a hard-core baseball fan, says he's a little disappointed to see fantasy football pass baseball in popularity, but he understands the spread of the format to other sports. "I've seen fantasy cricket in the UK, fantasy soccer. In Hong Kong there was a fantasy version of thoroughbred racing. It's easily adaptable to anything that is measurable," he said.

And though fantasy sports have never been more popular or profitable, Okrent's current income stream from his brainchild is now in the modest three-figure range. But he says he doesn't even mind that. "All I have to go on is the glory or shame of creating it," he said.

Chris Isidore. Senior Writer and weekly columnist. The ultimate fantasy -- profits. CNN/Money. September 2, 2003: 10:45 AM EDT.

The Crisis Du Jour

The 12 Angry Geeks fantasy league is once again in crisis. Or at least as big of a crisis as you can get in something that’s not real. It’s not like anyone fund out your wife left you for the plumber, or that you got passed up for a promotion since you don’t dress in sexy enough miniskirts at work (at least that’s my excuse).

With fantasy, the crisis comes from there not being enough going on in your league to distract you from those real problems. When none of that is going on, everything else gets magnified to the point of absurdity. That, in turn, becomes entertainment and settles the most restless of those in the league down.

For our league, this certain crisis was localized, contained to three geeks with a little too much time on their hands. Today’s crisis involved three Geeks from the league. The three Geeks listed their top priorities as to why the league sucks. Here’s a little bit about each Geek and what was bothering them today, and in general:

1. Mike From NYC
   Team Name - Jack Klugman

   Characteristics: Agitator, Deal Maker, Ruthless Offender
   When Mike’s not offering up waiver wire pick ups for your top players, he’s either ripping on your roster, your hairline, your abilities as fantasy GM, or as a human being. Today Mike had a few issues.

   The Goddamn Commissioner and His Cousin Collude - Ordinarily this would be a POSITIVE for the league because it would lead to incessant bitching and moaning and calling for the commissioner's head. But NO ONE CARES enough to really get inflammatory about it. After the initial wave of e-mails directed at the Commissioner last week -- which he basically blew off -- it was over.

   My Team Sucks - let's face it, if I was doing a whole lot better, I might feel a tad better about the league.

   No Pile On? NO HELP AT ALL! - Despite a fellow Geek’s outstanding efforts to publicly humiliate me today (which he has occasionally done with aplomb), NO ONE IS PILING on and really giving me the business. He has tried to get the Mike Bashing Bandwagon rolling - and let's face it, I deserve it at this point - but no one is helping the guy out.

   No Arguments Have Gotten Serious - Every good, very competitive fantasy league has fights that spiral a bit too far out of control. You know the type - guys get on each other about a bad trade, which morphs into false and hateful accusations, which morphs into a real argument over broader issues that gets quite heated, which results in a major fight that becomes so disproportionate to the initial infraction that it is comical. This is one of the funniest and often most entertaining things about fantasy leagues - they can get so heated over such minor stuff that it's sheer entertainment. In year's past it was Bart fighting with everyone; or Louis PHYSICALLY THREATENING (honest) a co-owner in our football league - but we've got none of it.

   No League Wide BBQ - Perhaps it's because we're bi-coastal, or maybe just lazy, but in year's past we've had a group BBQ - good times getting to witness Jay eat an entire pack of Hebrew Nationals and then say "What's for Dinner?"; watching Louis and Jay argue about who ate more; Watching Andrew drink A SINGLE BEER and get a little tipsy; watching Noah stand by the grill deadpan and ask if there is any tofu ... and we've got none of that. And it all breaks me heart. It breaks my coal black heart (ok, he didn’t say that, but I thought it wrapped up his bitching, very nicely).

2. Jay From East Harlem
   Team Name - Uptown Fatbacks

   Characteristics: Instigator, Trader, Nihilist
   Jay enjoys nothing more than seeing another member of the league roasting over an open pit, other than when it’s that’s adding coals to the fire. Here’s what was bothering Jay today:

   Procreation - The Big Time Spenders franchise had the nerve to have a baby boy. Talk about priorities.

   You Figure it Out - Half of Team Zissou is too busy cataloging urine samples and burning money.

   Gone Soft in the Suburbs - The Commissioner went big time, moved to the suburbs and lost his edge.

   Too Many Good Players Hating - Huckabuck's perfect draft has caused a lot of silent haters.

   Culinary Ingenuity - I'm trying to perfect beer can chicken but due to the suds being sold not in the individual can required for the recipe, but rather in quantities of 6, 12, 18, 24 or the dreaded 30-pack, am getting way too schnookered during the 90 minutes it takes to cook the f***in bird. So I get wasted, throw on Otis Redding, strip to my drawers and offer trades to the Big Time Spenders who, despite not having a drop of alcohol in 16 1/2 years has no problem accepting/countering. I wake up in the morning with a chicken carcass next to me in bed plus Randy Johnson in my rotation.

3. Rob From Las Vegas
   Team Name - Casual Friday

   Characteristics: Cheap Shot Artist, Trade Teaser, Lazy Bastard
   Rob’s team is doing all right. Good enough to be happy, but not good enough to enjoy the action. That breeds the need for lobbing emails that don’t make any sense, and saying he wants to trade, then rejecting the offers. Here’s what’s on his mind:

   Lurkers - Too many shadowy lurkers refusing to enter the fray - you can bust out something funny or inflammatory and get a chorus of nothingness from all but one or two people - very little piling on. And it’s always fun to offer them a trade and not even get an F-U response from them.

   Smarts - Owners in this league are too savvy to be ripped off. You read the Yahoo fantasy notes, detailing what players are being traded or released, and you think not a single one of those moves would be made in this league. Can we not find a Geek Patsy to take to the cleaners next season?

   Sobriety - Not enough drinking involved - everyone lives apart, so there are minimal opportunities to rip on people to their faces. What fun is a league where there’s little or no threat of imminent whisky fueled violence?

   Villains - No central league member to get people to rally against. The only thing more fun that alcohol fueled violence is an angry mob.

Aggravation Game It's not as aggravating as a trip on the Los Angeles highways, but the game of Aggravation is sure to put a monkeywrench into the complacency of gametime! Get your marbles around the board before it's too late, and you'll be the winner!

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