Opinion: Fantasy sports has a European future

Speak to any sports fan in the US about daily fantasy sports and you’ll soon learn the stateside fantasy gaming craze has taken over. Yards made, time on the ice, home runs, catches, shots under par – the market has secured a grip in everything from ice hockey and baseball, to golf and mixed martial arts.

Cross the pond to Europe and the picture is quite different – for now. In the UK, betting shops offer a traditional and accessible outlet for punters to wager on sport, while free-to-play fantasy games give the budding coach an outlet to analyse endless statistics over the course of a season, as they aim to win their league.

However, there’s an open goal in the middle-ground that’s waiting for daily, real-money fantasy sports sites to offer a service to those willing to wager, but unwilling to lock into a season-long tactical battle that is forgotten as soon as their star striker is injured and replaced by an unknown youngster – think Harry Kane at Tottenham – or when they find themselves hundreds of points behind after just a few gameweeks.

Early days

While the initial uptake of daily fantasy sports across the industry has been slower than that of the US, we’ve seen good growth in our own business. We officially launched ahead of the 2014 World Cup, with more than 20,000 unique registered users regularly playing.

Much of it is to do with awareness, and part of the challenge is gaining backing from the big players. In the US, huge corporations such as Disney and Comcast have seen the massive potential for daily fantasy sport (DFS) and are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into their own ventures.

With betting and season-long fantasy games markets already mature in the UK, the willingness for larger companies to risk stakes on an unknown is less forthcoming. On the other hand, there hasn’t been any significant innovation in gambling in over 20 years, since the rise of the internet outside betting exchanges.

Daily fantasy sports is the first breed of new games which taps into the growth of social networking and allows for this social connectivity to be explored and redefine the existing betting culture that has been the norm in Europe.

Raising interest

Large professional sport stakeholders in the US acknowledge that daily fantasy sports are accelerators of fan integration within their core products. Take the NBA for instance; the basketball season spans eight months and not all games of the regular season provide the level of excitement to prompt casual fans to follow the game on TV. By adding fantasy sports, those games become more compelling and thus increase the bottom line of both the NBA and its sponsors, which is viewership and advertising.

In Europe, if we look at football, for instance, this could be translated into higher viewership for less attractive games and leagues, therefore contributing to the growth of broadcasting revenues.

With so much opportunity to grow, the tide is now turning in favour of real-money fantasy sports in Europe. Over the coming months and years, expect this exciting side of the industry to grow and, when the time is right, big players to sit up and begin looking at investment into the sector that will see its popularity boom.