There can be little doubt about the way that technology has impacted the way that American’s enjoy and participate in sports. The rise of the two largest daily fantasy sports sites – FanDuel and DraftKings – combined with mobile technology, big data and incredible processing power has transformed the experience for many millions of people.
There are, however, many differences between the United States and Europe. The most obvious one being that European sports is dominated by football – not the American kind, but soccer – whereas the US has NFL, NBA and MLB. The frequent restarts in these games has made analysis much easier, in the same way that it is in cricket, but now European media firms are catching up rapidly.
Daily fantasy sports marks another big change in that the stakes of supporters are pooled together and league winners receive the majority of the money. The likelyhood of legal (or illegal) gambling being able to provide million dollar prizes for just a few dollars each to take part is unheard of. For this reason, American fantasy sports is generating a growing reputation for creating millionaires. These huge prizes have not transferred over to European fantasy football yet, but as prize pools are growing, it is likely that real personal wealth will be created for the best players.
It must be clear that there is a very real skillset that the best players have. It is no coincidence that many of the best players have backgrounds in areas like math, computer science and economics. Any game based around numbers and statistics will offer advantages to players who can collate, manipulate and analyse large amounts of data.
For normal players that want an interest during the game, the experience will be very similar to traditional betting. Most gamblers are enticed by odds, but are unlikely to win consistently. The world of fantasy sports requires similar estimates of the form of teams and players, but across a much wider group of fixtures, making it a much more complex proposition.
In the meantime as we wait to see how the sector develops in Europe, there are legal challenges underway in a number of US states, suggesting that in the future play will not be legal across the entire nation. This uncertainty provides a window that the European firms will want to use to catch up with their American peers.