Fantasy football changed how we see the game

His rationale was simple. In 1991, when he was a 25-year-old computer programmer, a family friend introduced Wainstein to fantasy baseball, a draft-based game which had been growing in popularity in the United States for a decade. Wainstein saw no reason a football equivalent would not work; he just needed to work out how players would score points.

Strikers could be judged by goals, of course, defenders and goalkeepers by clean sheets. Midfielders were more of an issue. “That’s what made us think of the assist,” Wainstein says now. “It was a way to judge midfielders. But that became a reason to be interested in who provided the pass for a goal. I think it was the first time they were valued.”

He means that in both senses of the word. It is strange to think that, only a little more than 30 years ago, football did not habitually bother quantifying how many goals a player created. Now, TV stations, newspapers, websites and fans themselves keep track of which players have the most. The assist has become, in effect, a gauge for how creative a player is, far more than just midfielders.

It may be something of an oversimplification, but there are two prevalent attitudes towards fantasy football. Some are not at all interested. Some are far too interested. (There is a third category, encompassing those who might start a season with the best of intentions to be in the latter group, but find themselves drifting inexorably into the former by November.)

Members of the first may underestimate just what a phenomenon fantasy has become, particularly Fantasy Premier League (FPL), the official version operated for the Premier League by an external provider, ISM, for more than two decades.

Its growth has been astonishing: between 2016 and 2022 the number of people playing it doubled, to a little more than nine million. Last season, it was 11.5 million. There is every reason to believe that will be bettered again this year; more than a million people registered to play it within 24 hours of the latest season’s launch.

Little wonder, then, that the Premier League regards FPL as “one of the most important pillars of our digital media strategy”, as Alexandra Willis, the league’s head of digital media and audience development, said in a rare public appearance at the SportsPro Media conference in 2023.

Although the league employs only one full-time staff member devoted to overseeing the game – other staffers work on it as part of their remits – it produces reams of content designed to appeal to players. For the last couple of years, the league has taken a far more active role in helping Sky Sports, in particular, produce ­fantasy-inflected material.

“For many people, it can be the first touchpoint to engaging with us directly,” Willis said. That is particularly true of who the Premier League thinks of as “fluid” fans: often younger, often international, those who have not had their support of a team forced on them by family or friends. The second biggest market for FPL, perhaps surprisingly, is Egypt. Nigeria is third, Malaysia sixth.

“It helps to bring people in,” Willis said, before they “broaden their fandom”, whether by watching coverage, buying merchandise or attending games. “Its value comes from its ability to engage fans,” she said. “It’s an example of the league being a central vehicle for the clubs and the broadcasters, and that’s something we believe we can do more. It is very accessible; that it is free to play is a fundamental principle. It offers depth and repeat behaviour, and those are the things that drive fandom that last for ever.”

The rise of fantasy, though, ­carries a greater significance than merely reinforcing the cultural and commercial dominance of the Premier League. As Wainstein’s status as the spiritual father of the assist indicates, those elements of football’s broader ecosystem that can often be regarded as liminal can change even the way fans who do not partake come to think of the game itself.

The most immediate manifestation of that, of course, is in the numbers themselves. Although Wainstein also conceived the first mass-market version of the game – complete with price lists – for the Daily Telegraph in 1994, he has mixed feelings, at best, about the behemoth that he indirectly unleashed; he still believes that the auction format that his company, Fantasy League, prefers is the better form of the game. “It’s more authentic, more sociable, maybe more mature,” he said. “But I am biased.”

He is also reluctant to claim that fantasy helped to condition fans to see football through a data-inflected lens. “It was part of that zeitgeist,” he said. “It came along as there were more games on television, more football journalism, more pundits, more data, you could say we piggybacked on where the game was going.”

Or, alternatively, it may have driven it; together with video games, fantasy helped create a generation of fans used to assessing players through their statistics; the idea that abilities can be assigned a numerical value is not as alien as it was in the early 1990s. Indeed, at times, it feels as though that approach may risk becoming reductive, players judged exclusively by their output, like machines.

Greater still may be how it changes the nature of fandom. Fantasy encourages players to be more invested in more games; fixtures beyond those of your team become relevant. “It pulls you away from partisanship,” said Wainstein. That has an impact. A number of studies in the United States, where fantasy sports have been part of the landscape for far longer, have suggested that fantasy does not necessarily build, and may even erode, traditional tribal bonds.

One study from the University of Alabama found that “41% of fantasy [American] football participants prefer a win by their fantasy team instead of their favourite team.” In some cases, fantasy players report that their “fandom of the NFL is higher than team identification”. Fantasy has already changed how all of us watch games, whether we play or not. That may, though, just be the first of many effects of its rise.

Photography by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images