Picture the scene; You’re making your Fantasy Premier League team selection at the last minute on a Friday afternoon, and you’re not sure whether your star striker will be fit for your team’s match on Saturday. There’s just one problem: you have no way of checking your physical condition until the Saturday papers are published. And instead of confirming your team’s changes by swiping an app, you need to call them ahead of schedule.
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Desperate times call for desperate measures. You contact the Premier League club the striker plays for and pretend to be a local journalist. Somehow you manage to get through to the assistant coach, who tells you that the striker will be available to play tomorrow. You call the fantasy football company and confirm your team for that weekend with the person on the other end of the line, smug knowing you’ve gained an advantage over your rivals.
If that sounds like an exaggeration – because, well, it is – it’s also a testament to the dedication shown by fantasy football players in the early days of the game in the UK. The above story is true – it happened in the 1990s in the league of Tim Benson, a business consultant, when a Liverpool striker was in doubt for the weekend.
This analogue version of fantasy football couldn’t be further from the official Premier League product of today, played by nearly 11 million users worldwide, including armchair experts, chess grandmasters and top players themselves. For early adopters like Benson, however, the version where friends hold draft-style auctions for fantasy players in person, call or fax team changes, and don’t know the point total until Tuesday. next fair will always have a special fascination.
“A friend of mine said it summed it up perfectly when he was in his kitchen and a game was on,” Benson told ESPN. “He only realized how important the whole thing was to him when [was] shouting to his wife: ‘Who crossed the ball for a Wigan goal?’ … Nobody cares, but of course we care – because it matters.”
This will be a familiar feeling for many virtual managers. With the Premier League ready to start again after the 2022 World Cup and fans turning their attention to their fantasy teams in the second half of the season, this is the story of how the game captured the imagination of England fans – and paved the way for into the global phenomenon that it is today.
Magazines and Fax Machines: The Beginning of Fantasy Football
Long before fantasy football started to take off in the UK, its predecessors in the US were hugely successful.
American sports fans haven’t wasted much time exploring the average fan’s love of statistics. Bill Winkenbach, the co-owner of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders, created the first fantasy gridiron league as early as 1962. Meanwhile, author Dan Okrent created “rotisserie baseball” in 1980, a fantasy game named after the Manhattan restaurant Le Rotisserie Français, where he and his friends would meet. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that fans across the Atlantic really sat up and took notice.
Andrew Wainstein is the man widely credited with introducing fantasy football to the UK. 🇧🇷 In 1991 – a year before the launch of the Premier League – he started compiling a database of top-flight players, which could be used for a fantasy game.
“The motivation was just kind of an enthusiasm for football,” said Wainstein, who was a 25-year-old computer programmer living at home at the time. “I was a huge fan of football; it’s obviously the No. 1 sport in the UK by far and I just thought, ‘People are so opinionated about this and so passionate about it – the stats can be a bit basic but it might work.'”
Wainstein was right, although he did not feature in the official Premier League game he has since taken over. With more stats than ever before, incentives like “Free Hit” tokens to keep players interested, and prizes including a seven-night UK break and a Hublot watch for the overall winner, this version is a world away. from the original created by Wainstein.
It took Wainstein about four months to come up with a scoring system for his game, called Fantasy League. Defenders and goalkeepers would be rewarded for keeping clean sheets, while goals scored were another easy metric, but Wainstein also introduced the concept of assists – the pass before a goal is scored – following the lead in basketball.
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Once Wainstein decided on the game’s format, he placed advertisements in football magazines. Prospective players would submit an entry fee and receive an information packet to start their league. Members of the new league would meet in person – in pubs or conference rooms – to hold a personal auction in which they would bid on top players. Just like today, the idea was to assemble a competitive team within the budget, knowing which stars were worth investing in.
Leagues would send their teams to Wainstein, who was then responsible for recording points and updating teams with replacements each week. Working from his older sister’s bedroom in Highgate, London, he often found himself swamped with phone calls and faxes on Friday afternoons when league administrators called to confirm teams before that weekend’s deadline.
“From 12:00 to 17:00 on a Friday afternoon it was almost non-stop, and then the fax too – sometimes the fax would run out of paper, so you’d run and change the fax paper while you were on the one or two phone calls,” he said. wainstein. “It was a lot of fun — it was busy, but every call was usually a laugh, so I didn’t resent it.”
With no internet and few football statistics, it was up to Wainstein to watch matches on Match of the Day to identify which players scored, assisted or contributed to clean sheets. Fantasy managers had to wait until Tuesday to receive updated leaderboards, posted by Wainstein.
Fans bought the game for professional and personal reasons. For Benson, it became a way to interact with potential customers, and it offered an easy way to have a conversation that didn’t revolve around business.
“That way you can say, ‘Hi, how are you? I don’t believe you scored a hat-trick last week; I don’t believe you won again, I don’t believe you’re going to win the league or you’re going to finish bottom. — and by the way, is there anything else?'” Benson said.
Wainstein also looked forward to these conversations.
“The part that I think was really magical about it was you got to talk to a lot of these people who were running leagues every Friday afternoon,” he said. “They didn’t just say, ‘Oh, how was your week?’ and ‘Oh God, my team is bottom of the league’, you would also have this kind of joke going around, ‘I have these two players and I have them on my bench and I can’t decide between them. ‘”
The resounding success of fantasy football gives birth to the modern game
The game proved to be a success. The first version in the 1991-92 season attracted around 600 to 700 players who were part of 80 leagues. But attendance figures really started to take off when the game was regularly mentioned in a new BBC Radio 5 live programme.
Wainstein worked with the Daily Telegraph newspaper to create the first mass market version in January 1994 and interest was further increased by the “Fantasy Football League” TV show, presented by comedians and future writers of the England supporters anthem “Three Lions”, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner – which featured a character named “Statto” in the mold of the game’s creator, a role Wainstein turned down.
This proved to be a turning point as the game’s popularity soared. Out of a total circulation of about 900,000, Wainstein estimates that 350,000 of the Telegraph’s readers subscribed to the paper’s version. According to Peter Suchet, then director of the Telegraph’s sports marketing department, the first winner was a 14-year-old boy who won two tickets to any football match – he chose a cup final in Brazil.
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As Suchet says, those who took football seriously were rewarded – although some took it too seriously.
“I remember a poll of a guy saying, ‘I go to my room, I lock the door, I look at all the goals that the football players on my team scored over the weekend… Said Suchet. “I have conversations imaginary ones with them – I tell them, ‘You suck, I’m transferring you.’ 🇧🇷
Other newspapers took notice and began producing their own versions – some showing more effort than others – and there was another sea change when Wainstein released the first online version of his game in 1996. This meant that fans no longer had to rely on phone lines or fax machines to make substitutions – but it also signaled the end of the game’s “magic” analog days.
The Premier League followed suit, with its official version launched in the 2002-03 season. It’s more popular than ever now, and not just with the average fan: World chess champion Magnus Carlsen’s Twitter bio still boasts that he is a “Former Fantasy Premier League #1 (live) player”, while one website claims to track Premier League teams from the league’s stars, including Bukayo Saka, James Maddison and Kalvin Phillips.
All virtual coaches will face the same dilemmas after the World Cup break — Will Erling Haaland continue where he left off after losing the tournament in Qatar? Should fantasy players use their wild card and trade the whole team with a lot of tired players after Qatar? And how do you replace Arsenal’s Gabriel Jesus after injuring his knee during the Brazil campaign?
None of these issues would matter so much if it weren’t for the game that Wainstein created 31 years ago – and which many of its early adopters have stuck with, despite the rise of the Premier League version. So why has fantasy football been such a huge success in the UK?
“It’s the closest any young football lover will come to managing a team,” said Suchet. “They get lost in the romance of that game and become managers for a moment in their lives – they’re managing their own team. It’s sad but true.”
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