ESPN enters its 27th fantasy football season after launching in 1996. CBS Sports, which now provides free and premium leagues, first offered its online fantasy football leagues a year later. Yahoo Sports was also among the first industry movers and remains one of the more popular platforms today.
Brian Marshall, vice president of sports products and strategy for Disney media and entertainment distribution, said ESPN’s fantasy football business is “on pace to significantly surpass” an all-time record for players set in 2021, though he didn’t disclose specific figures.
In ESPN’s nearly three decades in the fantasy football business, Marshall said the most pronounced change has been the migration from desktop to mobile applications. Over 85% of time spent playing ESPN fantasy football is via the ESPN fantasy app, which “impacts every product design and engineering decision we make,” he said. Despite the change in users’ behaviors, nearly half of ESPN fantasy football players still conduct their drafts on desktop, though the shift toward mobile increases each year.
FanDuel Group’s Aaron Champagne, general manager of DFS, Free to Play, said the platform is mobile-first for daily fantasy sports, a subset of the industry in which users build teams over short periods of time, as opposed to the more traditional season-long leagues.
Champagne doesn’t view the legacy fantasy sports operators and publishers as direct competitors but rather “complementary” entities because of the different offerings, specifically season-long fantasy versus daily. When asked if FanDuel has taken any lessons from the legacy fantasy brands and integrated them into its own products, Champagne said they allow fantasy football players to compete with friends.
“That’s where we continue to learn from them,” he said, “and bring people together to make the sports watching experience even more enjoyable.” The company now offers friends challenges and private contests to recreate a communal experience with friends.
Greg Karamitis, senior vice president of product management at DraftKings, said the company, which launched in 2012 and is FanDuel’s chief rival in the DFS space, monitors the competition, but “will innovate where we think there is untapped demand.”
One new product is DraftKings’ Reignmakers Football, a blockchain-based fantasy sports initiative where users buy digital player cards, build a lineup and compete against other users in a daily fantasy contest. DraftKings said it’s the first operator to launch such an initiative, which gives users access to over 500 active NFL players via a company licensing deal with the NFL Players Association.
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