Fantasy: From Big Dreams to Big Business

Everyone has dreams as a child, ranging from owning a Fortune 500 company, to winning an Oscar, to playing shortstop for the Dodgers. Just what is it that makes these dreams a “fantasy”, and how has the meaning of the word evolved over the years? Given the rapidly growing industry of fantasy sports, it’s clear that a once make-believe game of football scenarios has evolved into a very real big business, with billions of dollars spent on the numerous varieties of fantasy sports each year.

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, a fantasy is “the faculty or activity of imagining things, especially things that are impossible or improbable”, which explains every young boy’s dream of someday playing in the big leagues. While the textbook definitions of fantasy may be true regarding envisioning ourselves in far-fetched life goals or bringing Utopian ideals to life, “fantasy sports” have altered reality in a way that fudge the fine line between imagination and reality, based on the evolution of the game into a tangible, money-driven industry.

Initially created prior to the 1980 baseball season by a group of writers in New York who each created a fictitious baseball team in hopes of creating a deeper interest in the game, they fulfilled their childish dream of running their own baseball organization. Founder Daniel Okrent called it the Rotisserie Baseball League, but it was the birth of fantasy sports after his struggles to keep the name copyrighted. The game grew exponentially, first across the country, then in large numbers with the advent of the Internet. At that point, the fantasy of owning, paying and selling players, began to become a tangible reality in mainstream society.

The game was simply made for the Internet, so it’s not completely surprising. The tabulation of statistics that was by hand in 1980, now immediately uploads to servers, making the game in real time. ESPN Page 2 columnist and founder of Grantland.com, Bill Simmons says, “Thank God for the Internet. Definitely the Internet has been the best for porn and gambling, but I think fantasy is a close third”. He’s right, as without the electronic adaption to the game, not only would the game have died out as a fad, but it would have never become a big business, thus remaining just a fantasy.

Along with the Internet, came the spawning of the game to football, which is now the king of fantasy sports. While rotisserie baseball helped transcend the game of baseball from a trying time during the end of the 20th Century with the birth of statistical analysis and sabremetrics, for football, fantasy has little to do with the changing of the game itself, and more with how Americans interact and invest in the National Football League. According to Rick Horrow, the CEO of Horrow Sports Ventures and a leading sports business analyst, fantasy football alone is an $800 million industry, and is still growing. He claims that the NFL itself has put forth the effort of expanding the link between reality and fantasy, with “their promotional machinery, the stadium opportunities, and their media partners, all available to help fantasy be even better than it is today”.

That pushing from the National Football League is key, as by accepting the growing game of fantasy, the league is able to market itself to a whole new category of fan: the Redskins fan in Virginia who stays up late for Monday Night Football just to see how many catches Chargers tight end Antonio Gates gets, 3,000 miles to the west. It’s akin to cigarette companies marketing to middle-schoolers, and with the pressures of digital media, the league does not have to do much to allow fantasy football to market itself, as Horrow mentioned.

As mentioned earlier, the media and their use of technology is clearly the driving force of the shift in nature, as at any given time there’s no fewer than six links to fantasy news, analysis and games on the front page of ESPN.com, and both MLB.com and NFL.com feature league sanctioned fantasy games on their websites. Both MLB.tv and the MLB Network even have their own show, Fantasy 411, catering to the needs of fantasy baseball fans directly from the mouths of the league itself.

Yahoo Sports has “well over 4 million users” playing in their leagues for fantasy football alone, up from just 500,000 in 1999. Fantasy sports is a cash cow not only for mainstream digital media outlets like Yahoo, but digital sectors for multifaceted media juggernauts like CBSSports.com, FOX Sports on MSN and even Disney, who owns ESPN. Sport Illustrated’s Chris Ballard reported in 2004 that CBS SportsLine, what it was called at the time, generated $15.9 million of revenue from fantasy sports alone, forcing growth within their fantasy department from three writers in 1996, to over 50 contributors in 2004. The monetary value of the industry has changed tremendously in the seven years since Ballard’s manifesto on the industry, as according to Horrow back in June, ESPN the Magazine’s cancelling of their annual fantasy football guide due to the NFL Lockout, cost the magazine $3 to 4 million in lost advertising just for that one issue.

The financial effect, both positive and negative, of fantasy sports to the media outlets is beyond comprehension for the founders of the game, as they failed to corner the market of fantasy baseball. In the game’s infancy, the fantasy came from the ability to run a fictious team, but the game play was real. “Reality? Unreality? No, no. Our teams were ultra real. They were a cohesive group loyal to [our] management,” remembers Glenn Waggoner, co-winner of the inaugural Rotisserie Baseball League in 1980. But now, with the integration of technology, corporate capital and need for advertising revenue, the reality of it all is in the establishment of the fantasy sports industry as multi-billion dollar platform.

The basis of the game itself remains as much of a fantasy as the dream of having Tom Brady and Adrian Peterson in the same backfield, but the fiscal footprint of the industry continues to push the bounds of reality for one that brands itself with such an illusionistic name.

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