Fantasy Sports (also known as Rotisserie, or Roto, or Owner Simulation) is an activity where participants act as owners and/or general managers to build a team that competes against other fantasy owners and/or general managers based on the statistics generated by the real individual players or teams in a professional sport. Probably the most common variant converts statistical performance into points that are compiled and totaled according to a roster selected by a fantasy participant that makes up a fantasy team. These point systems are typically simple enough to be manually calculated by a “league commissioner.” More complex variants use computer modeling of actual games based on statistical input generated by professional sports. In fantasy sports, there is the ability to trade, cut, and sign players, like a real sports owner or general manager. Football is currently the most popular fantasy sport. Joining a fantasy group has become an excellent way to learn a sport in more depth.
It’s estimated by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) that 29.9 million people age 12 and above in the U.S. and Canada played fantasy sports in 2007. A prior study by the FSTA showed 19.4 million people age 12 and above in the U.S. and Canada played fantasy sports in 2006, and 34.5 million people had played fantasy sports at some point in time. A 2006 study showed 22 percent of U.S. adult males 18 to 49 years old, with Internet access, play fantasy sports. Fantasy Sports is estimated to have a $3–$4 billion annual economic impact across the sports industry, and the impact continues to grow.
The seminal moment for the growth of fantasy sports was the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s. The new technology lowered the barrier to enter the hobby, as statistics could quickly be compiled online and news and information became readily available. While several fantasy businesses had migrated to the internet in the mid-1990s, the watershed era for online fantasy sports was in 1997 when two web sites made a debut that forever changed the fantasy sports industry: Commissioner.com and RotoNews.com. Commissioner.com launched on January 1, 1997 and first offered a fantasy baseball commissioner service that changed the nature of fantasy sports with real-time stats, league message boards, daily updated box scores and other features. RotoNews changed how fantasy sports information was presented on the web with the innovation of the “player note,” which were snippets of information posted every time a player got hurt, traded, benched, or had a news event that impacted his fantasy value — all searchable in a real-time database. Thereafter, the larger media players got involved. Yahoo.com added fantasy sports in 1999 and offered most of its games for free — a largely new business model for fantasy sports. A trade group for the industry, the Fantasy Sports Trade Association was formed in 1998. Other entries during this era included Fanball.com, launched in 1999 by the parent company of Fantasy Football Weekly.
Today, major sports media television outlets, such as ESPN and Fox Sports, and the web sites of major networks that televise sports, such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, offer online fantasy sports and televised fantasy sports shows. Sirius/XM satellite radio now offers programming for fantasy players.
It is interesting to note that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 specifically exempts fantasy sports games, educational games, or any online contest that “has an outcome that reflects the relative knowledge of the participants, or their skill at physical reaction or physical manipulation (but not chance), and, in the case of a fantasy or simulation sports game, has an outcome that is determined predominantly by accumulated statistical results of sporting events, including any non-participant’s individual performances in such sporting events…”