Fitzdares co-founder launches new in-play fantasy football app

Fitzdares co-founder Joe Cocozza has launched a new free-to-play app which combines in-play betting and social gaming with fantasy football. The Fanslide app takes the concept of traditional fantasy football but is played on one-off matches, with the in-play element serving as a key differentiator. Users can slide players in and out of the game during a match into one of three point-scoring positions. Each player starts with a time bank of 20 minutes which can be used in a match. This time bank activates and depletes when the player is moved into a point-scoring position, with each point-scoring position having a different multiple, up to 3x. Once this time bank is exceeded, the player can no longer be placed in a point-scoring position. Players lose two points if they are withdrawn before the end of the 20-minute period. Participants receive a rating based on their performance of sliding players into and out of point-scoring positions. The app, which is free to download from both Apple and Google Play App stores, has prize money available on every single match during Euro 2020.

However, it is understood this will be widened to include other leagues in future iterations. Cocozza, a former Ladbrokes senior trader, co-founded luxury bookmaker Fitzdares in 2005 before transitioning out of the industry in October 2008. A former angel investor, he first embarked on what would become the Fanslide business in 2017. “I had the idea kicking around in my head for a while,” Cocozza told EGR. “I was doing a bit of angel investing myself and invested in a company in the US that was doing something similar, but a sports fantasy stock market model. “Investing in this business really switched me on to thinking about this idea for myself. Two mutual friends who would later become investors and co-founders in the business went to see Opta to see what options there were in terms of live data. “At that point, no one had really created a proper interactive live in-play fantasy game. There have since been a few developed that claim it, but they are not as live and interactive as the approach we’ve taken,” he added. Powered by Opta data, the app features a range of statistics on players and a real time vidiprinter feed, which provides users with updates of player movements. The full development process, Cocozza revealed, took a year and a half, utilising the Opta WebSocket data option, which allows the data to be updated instantly. “We started out with some ideas surrounding the mechanics of the game and I used my understanding of the psychology of a gambler and combined it with my experiences on the other side of the fence as a football fan,” he explained. “We wanted to create that ongoing excitement in the game in a way that was similar to deciding whether to cash out a bet. “I’ve been to so many football matches where guys in the row behind talk about cashing out. Even if you don’t cash out, there’s still that ongoing engagement with the product, which is something we hope to replicate with Fanslide,” he added. A version of the app was previously scheduled for launch to coincide with the Euro 2020 tournament last year but was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “In some ways it’s been a blessing because its enabled us to have a beta testing phase and iron out a lot of the kinks in the product where they have been identified by our testers,” Cocozza explained. While the game is currently free-to-play, a version of the game which utilises pooled betting mechanics is currently in the process of being developed after the firm submitted a successful application for a UK licence. The pooled betting version would allow fans to bet against one another on their in-game performance. The firm could have a pooled betting product ready to launch as early as the end of 2021. Independent of the pooled betting iteration, EGR can reveal the business is looking to a potential B2B licensing model of both the non-betting and the betting versions of the app to organisations and operators looking to increase fan engagement. Versions of the game focused on other sports including the NFL, cricket and basketball are also slated for development.