A look at Australian Fantasy Sports

Australian fantasy sports are failing in the same way the NBL is failing; they just don’t know their strengths.

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Basketball is explicit; The crowd is only meters away, there are only ten bodies on the floor at once, the court is small, the benches and team meetings can be heard, even the players themselves are larger and more literally explicit. It’s this intimacy between player, game, and fan which makes basketball such a great spectator sport.

And yet, the NBL continues to minimize this aspect of their product. Their marketing campaign has a collectivist focus on the “game”, when it should be individualistic focused on the players.

There is a reason my Mum knows who Michael Jordan is, but she doesn’t know how many points a layup is worth. The nuances of the game are hard to learn, but everyone knows how to engage emotionally with a person. Basketball is like the original reality TV. The plot doesn’t matter because the characters personalities are so powerful.

People relate, engage, and interact with players they feel they know. If you go to the local park and two guys are playing pickup hoops, you don’t really care who wins or loses. But, if one of those guys is a person you know, you inherently have an invested interest in the outcome. Pro-basketball is no different.

The NBL needs to focus on exploiting their strength (their larger-than-life players), and engage with the consumer emotionally; when a consumer is emotional they become irrational, and when a consumer is irrational, they spend.

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The same is true for fantasy sports.

Its strength is its social utility. As nerdy as pretending to manage a team of players you have never met before, and celebrate THEIR triumphs as your own is, fantasy sports is incredibly socially interactive.

Its success and attraction lies in its ability to facilitate people’s social lives on an emotional level. Even more so than social networking sites, fantasy sports provide a true medium for social interaction; fantasy sports convey raw egotism and emotion opposed to the utilitarian blandness conveyed on Facebook or myspace.

The heart of this interaction occurs in the league draft. “Managers” discuss and interact as a precursor to the draft, they engage and react during the draft, and they debate and defend after the draft. It’s a social PED.

Socialising is all about communication. Fantasy sports merely facilitate that communication by providing engaging, emotional content. So in theory fantasy sports should be huge everywhere, especially a socially cognitive place like Australia. Right?

Right. But the problem is, leading Australian fantasy sites (Foxposrts.com.au, Sportal.com.au, virtualsports.com.au) aren’t draft compatible. They are all salary cap / dream team oriented. That is, everyone can select any player they want as long as they stay within the salary cap.

The problem with this format is it usually leads to everyone having the same top 4 or 5 guys, and just hoping their cheap fliers pay off. It’s unsociable because there is no debate, no accountability. It’s the same reason relationships are a gossip stable. They facilitate debate because they explicitly hold the stakeholders accountable for investing in each other.

With a draft people are forced to invest themselves in the fortunes of a player no one else will have. That guy becomes their guy, and they have to defend him because a attack on him is, in reality, a attack on them.

Like the pick-up hoops game in the park, fantasy sports have no residual connection to the audience until they invest themselves emotionally in a player.

The Australian market is ripe, and fantasy sports is a cash cow. It just needs to be milked in the right way.

Brisbane Sports Fan