Happy Panic Productions

The Appeal of Fantasy Football: General Theory #1

So picking up on my thought from yesterday... oh wait: Jim pointed me toward a UK-based online fantasy cricket league. So there is such a thing! But we have yet to see evidence of the fantasy sports phenomenon in non-English speaking countries. I could ask my friend who's getting a doctorate in anthropology, but I'm sure it doesn't exactly relate to her thesis. I've never studied anthropology in any capacity, but if I were to do so, I could see myself writing a term paper trying to find the reasons for the widespread appeal of fantasy sports. (Maybe this would be actually be a sociological or psychological study, which shows you how little I know about anthropology.)

I mean, how do you explain the appeal? (I will tackle the entire fantasy sports phenomenon first, before I investigate why football has emerged as the most popular fantasy sport (the Special Theory of the Appeal of Fantasy Football).) The only reason I've consistently heard participants give is that it "involves" them more in the sports-watching activity. This, I guess, is just an extension of the team-rooting phenomenon, in which the spectator personally identifies with one team and claims their victories as his own. There is usually a social pressure to select the team to identify with based on geographic proximity: e.g., in Chicago, you'd better be a Bears fan. One outcome of this social pressure is that the team's losses also become the spactator's losses (through no fault of his own); common sense dictates that, to increase one's enjoyment of watching sports, the spectator should try to only identify with a winning team, but the social pressures strongly dissuade this behavior, attaching the stigma of "fairweather fan" to anyone who would dare be so disloyal.

Fantasy sports, then, can be seen as a means of subverting the team-loyalty pressures by allowing the spectator to align himself not with other teams, but only certain individual members of other teams. If the spectator's team is performing poorly, he can still get enjoyment from identifying with individuals who are performing well, and feeling like he is participating in their success. It is very much like the team-rooting phenomenon, but diluted (or diversified) to allow the spectator a higher probability of "success" (or return on his sports-viewing investment). Furthermore, this player-rooting does not carry the social pressures of loyalty as does team-rooting; on the contrary, no loyalty to a particular player is expected, and in fact it is entirely expected that any given player will be "disposed of" as soon as he no longer helps his "owner" "succeed" (we will revisit these terms in Theory #3).

General Theory #1: Identification, in summary: fantasy sports appeals because it increases spectators' chances of rooting for a winner.

Up next: General Theory #2: Simulation.