Keeping pace with reality

With the less than 9hrs to go to the start of The Premier League season, over 9.5m people will be glued to their chosen news feeds today to see whether Erling Haaland will start for Manchester City Football Club , in the season opener at newly promoted Burnley Football Club . Why only 9.5m? Well, we’re sure many more globally will be following the build up to the game – the league is now broadcast to more than 800 million homes in 188 countries - but 9.5m equates to the whopping 87% of +11m Fantasy Premier League (FPL) managers who - at the time of rambling - have picked Haaland in their teams. (Surely this is some sort of record??)

FPL is back and, to celebrate, we thought we’d take a ramble through this digital phenomenon that is now a staple part of the Premier League’s domestic and international marketing strategies . Firstly, we should put our cards on the table - we’ve both played before but neither of us are avid fans of the concept. We’ve only made it all the way to the end of a season on a few occasions and so we’re maybe not the most impartial of judges; perhaps we just don’t get some of the nuances that have made FPL so popular with so many??The smart people are the Premier League are clearly doing some right through given the steep upward growth in participation over the years, but we couldn’t help but wonder just how much of an impact macro factors like the boom in mobile technologies have had.

The other question we found ourselves coming back to was just how much the Premier League’s Fantasy product has kept pace with reality? From a technical point, the league will have had to scale up the stability of its digital infrastructure to cope with the fluxes in interest – at the start of the?2012/13 season the site crashed before the first game week deadline – and will have significantly developed both its mobile offering and speed of data processing to cater for changing technologies and fan expectations.

The game itself has undergone changes as it has grown with, “chips” added that allow you to turbo charge your performance at certain points but, to us, it feels like scale of change has not been proportionate to changes in the game’s audience and in the League / football as a whole. For example, with exception of chips, the scoring system has remained fundamentally the same despite the growth in the number of players, meaning the differential impact of a high performing player is less than it once was and it is harder to gain an advantage .?Also, when elite teams are signing individual players for figures north of the ￡100m total budget you are given, the player valuations feel somewhat out of kilter with the modern game. ?

FPL is a successful component of The Premier League’s multi-faceted fan experience offering, providing an alternative means and format for fans to engage with the PL brand, but its feels like the game itself could benefit from offering a non-linear option. At present, unlike fantasy sports businesses such as DraftKings Inc. and FanDuel , the only way to play is across the entirety of the season, from start to finish and, in reality, that is pretty hard to do. How many of us have started a team with the best of intentions but found it too difficult to keep up with the changes required and so dropped out / lost interest? The Premier League themselves acknowledge that “many people maybe don’t make it all the way to the end of the season” and it would be fascinating to know just how many of the 11m stay the course. Perhaps different competition formats that allowed people to play for / commit to shorter period of play would push numbers engagement even further – or perhaps there could even be an automated manager option, as with Football Manager, you could place in charge to get you through your most distracted periods??

It also feels like FPL has served to accentuate the culture of the individual in terms of fandom. Social media and the global growth of the game has increasingly led to fans following individual players rather than?teams - as evidenced by the seismic shifts in social media followings messrs Ronaldo and Messi have generated with their recent transfers – and FPL certainly encourages you to follow the fortunes of the players you’ve selected, sometimes at the expense of the team you support. It's not clear what the Premier League think about this focus on the individual – the players are, after all, presented individually under the PL banner – but it would be interesting to know how this is perceived by its member clubs and the impact it has on their own followings.

Finally, we think the Premier League could benefit commercially by doing more to connect the fantasy product with the real thing. For example, could the points a player score in game link to match highlights showing how the points were scored? Appreciate there are a rights issues here to navigate but this would create an instant connection between fantasy and the real thing. Perhaps also, on each player’s information tab, there could be a link to buy their shirt from the respective club website, thereby helping to drive revenues?

It is clear that with FPL, The Premier League have built a hugely popular product, one that has pretty much laid waste to its competitors and now serves a key component of their marketing activities. As the game matures into its twenties, it will be fascinating to see how the league continues to evolve it, particularly in a world of more developed Web 3.0 technologies. Whatever they do, the focus should be on bringing the fantasy game up to speed with the modern realities of football and the world in which it is consumed. For example, lighter, more “snackable” versions of the game could be created to attract new audiences and broaden the reach of their brand. They could even explore collaborations through their EA SPORTS partnership that would allow gamers to play with their fantasy teams. Now that might even get us playing!

The Sports TEC Ramble is based on the weekly musings of our consultants?Kevin Bain ?&?David Wright ?on the technology news and trends shaping the sports industry.

**P.S. for those still scratching their head at the Nordic meat shield reference...