How fantasy can help performance
Fantasy sports can be used to help performance betting achieve its potential. Dave McDowell, chief executive of FSB, explains how.
In case you missed it, the England footÂball coach recently announced a new player-performance rating system: The Capello Index. The Football Association immediately shut it down.
It was a shocking own goal. Not just for the obvious abuse of his position but because we don’t need another comÂplicated player rating system. Castrol, Actim and now the Capello Index are all examples of systems over-engineered by academics. It may generate some interÂesting talking points, but where is the practical application?
The way it was announced makes me believe he was trying to make a splash into the business of fantasy sports, a multi-billion dollar market in the US. Fantasy continues to grow in popularÂity and there are 6.5 million players in the UK. But nobody wants their fantasy game to use a complicated index that they can’t understand.
So how should we rate performance? Most fantasy games use goals, bookings and clean sheets because they were available in the newspaper ten years ago. Today there is so much more informaÂtion available such as blocked shots and completed passes. A better performance rating system is needed, but it needs to be easily understood.
Meanwhile, bookmakers can see the consumer interest in betting on player performance. Goal scorer markets are a great success and player supremacy is one of the most popular bets at Sporting Index. But neither system can be used to compare defenders against midfielders and forwards.
For performance betting to achieve its potential, we need a player rating system that can be used in both fantasy sports and in betting markets. And the 2010 World Cup finals mark the first time that this will happen. Metro newspapers in the UK designed their fantasy football game around FSB Points, while the system is also being promoted by Sky Sports as their objective performance ratings and used by SkyBet to offer fixed-odds betÂting markets. This shows how fantasy sports can be used to help push sports betting into the mass market.