Fantasy Football: The Explosive Growth Of An American Phenomenon
Fantasy Football is bigger than ever, with anywhere from 30 million to a projected 75 million Americans participating in fantasy football leagues, hosted by the likes of ESPN, Yahoo, and NFL.com. It’s a far cry from the humble beginnings of fantasy football, dating back to the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League, created in 1962 by a group of eight team owners comprised of Raiders employees, NFL officials, and reporters. Today, fantasy football is a cultural phenomenon, as the latest numbers show that the demographic profile of participants is increasingly diverse, and the financial impact of fantasy football has never been greater.
According to outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc., based on an estimated 66 percent of fantasy football participants being employed full time, the lost productivity cost of fantasy football to employers in 2015 could be as high as $16 billion. In other words, fantasy football will cost the American economy roughly the equivalent of Iceland’s entire GDP in 2015. By estimating that each player will spend at least one hour per week of company time managing their roster, checking the waiver wire, or pursuing other league activities, the firm used data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Fantasy Sports Trade Association to come up with their projections.
Lest employers think that only the middle-aged, slightly nerdy men in their workforce are prone to the allure of fantasy football leagues, the demographics indicate otherwise. According to Yahoo! Screen, approximately 20 percent of fantasy football players in 2012 were women, up from just 12 percent in 2009. The average age is skewing increasingly younger, representing a marketer’s dream as John Diver, ESPN’s senior director of product development, succinctly put it in a 2013 interview with Ad Age.
“Our dream user that we talk about is, we get an 18-year-old kid going into college, get nine of his friends to play fantasy football, and we have them for the next 30 years”
With fantasy football team owner demographics skewing towards the college-educated, with a household income of over $90,000 annually, marketers are in a frenzy to cash in on the popularity of fantasy football. Yahoo recently announced the inclusion of private cash leagues into their wildly successful fantasy football platform, following their recent foray into the daily fantasy sports league market in July. These leagues, combined with customized apps, subscription-based newsletters, and other league management tools, represent what some estimate to be as large as a $70 billion industry annually.
The NFL doesn’t kick off until tomorrow night in Foxborough, Massachusetts, with the Pittsburgh Steelers taking on the New England Patriots, but perhaps the biggest winner of the 2015 football season has already been determined as companies like Yahoo, ESPN, and others have taken full advantage of the fantasy football craze that has swept over America.
[Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images Entertainment]
