From Fax To NFTs, The Evolution Of Fantasy Sports

José Miranda, Founder and Game Architect at RealFevr, looks at some of the key reasons RealFevr was born and how the fantasy sports industry has developed through some keywords.

On its own, the expression Fantasy Sports could mean many different things, but for a continuously growing mass of people, it defines not only the game that they spend most of their time on but also a new layer that was added to Sports, enhancing them into a level of addictiveness like no other.

For us, at RealFevr, this is what we do: a game. Or games, to be more specific, given the different types of fantasy games we are currently providing. And RealFevr was born from this addictiveness, molded by it.

GAME

A competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement.

Born in the US of A, somewhere in the early 60s (you can know more about its origins in the ESPN documentary “Silly Little Game”), it was just natural that American sports, with their box scores, the old habit of collecting data, registering games, evaluating player production, keeping track of everything, worked as the perfect vehicle for a new kind of game. Apparently, having records back to the 19^th century had an unforeseen value that football missed along its path.

DATA

Individual facts, statistics, or items of information.

At the turn of the millennium, the massification of computers and Internet access opened the doors of fantasy sports to the big crowds, putting what was, until then, a niche hobby that was played by fax between friends into the spotlight of the public eye. Big corporations, like Yahoo and CBS among many others, and professional leagues, like the NBA, stepped in, creating their own fantasy sports models, cross-selling their product to users throughout the United States and Canada (and also small communities around the world of sports followers) using several types of competitions to fuel fan engagement.

COMPETITION

Rivalry between two or more persons or groups for an object desired in common, usually resulting in a victor and a loser.

This new reality, where you could compete with thousands of other users at the same time, in a subject where everybody sees themselves as experts in the matter, built the foundations for the first growth spurt of Fantasy Sports.

“This perfect storm, of amazingly fast connectivity, detailed real-time data, and a user-base eager to follow suit with the game’s evolution, allowed for the Fantasy Sports industry to enter a whole new dimension.”

Coincidentally, at the same time, a new standard of operations was catching steam in American sports and its clubs, after Michael Lewis kicked off the Moneyball era in the Oakland A’s office. By fighting the established conceptions on player analysis, with the introduction of a mathematical and scientific approach that goes not only deeper than what the eyes of the analyst can perceive but also fighting most of the cognitive biases that are natural to human perception, he started a revolution in the analytics field like never seen before. One so big that it generated its own movie, with Brad Pitt as the main character.

The development in the sport itself, around a new winning formula, prompted a reeducation of the fan base, subjecting them to a series of new terminologies and statistics that were being invented almost on a weekly basis.

ANALYTICS

The analysis of data, typically large sets of business data, by the use of mathematics, statistics, and computer software.

This perfect storm, of amazingly fast connectivity, detailed real-time data, and a user-base eager to follow suit with the game’s evolution, allowed for the Fantasy Sports industry to enter a whole new dimension, becoming a multi-billion-dollar industry in less than ten years.

And while this was happening across the pond, football (soccer for some) albeit taking its first steps into this new era had an awfully specific nuance to this process, as unlike the North American reality, and many other sports, where the latest discoveries and new theories were brought up for discussion, in Football most of the developments were made with the same secrecy as the Manhattan Project.

“Nowadays, people show up with good ideas on Twitter and a few weeks later they may find themselves working for a football club, with the current need for data scientists that can translate football into numbers and back into football.”

The football community, specially the online one and all the kids that played every single version of Championship Manager or Football Manager, was starving for this, for this evolution in the game we love. And so were we at RealFevr, in order to continue to lay out our development plans, expand to new game models and more intricate scoring systems.

EVOLUTION

Any process of formation, growth, or development.

It took some time for Football to overcome its natural conservatism, a sport in which the usual box score had only two numbers that really mattered: home score vs. away score. The process was slow, as only now, almost 20 years after the Michael Lewis book and 10 after the Brad Pitt movie, we can honestly say that analytics are a vector to be reckoned in the decision-making processes of many clubs around the world, throughout the several moving parts of their operations: signing and releasing players, game-plan preparation for weekly matches or the daily analysis of practice sessions and conditioning of players.

This is where we find ourselves now, with all the conditions in place for a perfect storm to happen again, this time in the football sphere, with the certainty that recent successes like the ones of Leicester and Brentford are the signs of a revolution that will not stop.

Nowadays, people show up with good ideas on Twitter and a few weeks later they may find themselves working for a football club, with the current need for data scientists that can translate football into numbers and back into football.

REVOLUTION

A radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure.

Football is now on a path where professionally managed clubs, with proper orientation and a defined set of goals can achieve competitive heights well beyond their perceived and expected level.

At RealFevr, this is not the only revolution that we are currently putting ourselves behind, trying to motor it forward. If our evolution so far has taken advantage of the recent advancements in analytics, the ones that paved the way for better and more accessible stats, our future steps should go beyond that. We must not stay within the confines of our industry, we should not isolate ourselves from what is happening around us. Instead, we should dig deep into our community and beyond that as well.

“We must not stay within the confines of our industry, we should not isolate ourselves from what is happening around us.”

We have been able to continuously upgrade our offer, widen the number of available competitions for our users, making use of this new reality of in-depth real-time data to be used in different ways throughout our platform, taking our games a little bit further every time we iterate them, making them more interactive, engaging, and challenging.

And that is why we are stepping into the world of blockchain, creating our own NFTs, a marketplace to go along with it, and an utility token that fuels an entire new ecosystem of fantasy games.

NFT

Short for non-fungible token, cryptographic assets on blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other.

Not only do we seek to be on the forefront of games, sports and technology, we thrive from it. With the upcoming developments in the RealFevr universe, set for this summer, I believe we will expand our goals even further, delivering what is an absolute game-changer, not only for the growing number of fantasy players orbiting around us but also for the industry itself.

NFTs may be just another small step for RealFevr. But they are a giant leap for Fantasy Sports.

The author José Miranda is Founder and Game Architect at RealFevr, fantasy league expert, analytics aficionado, football lover.