The story of Fantasy Football and how the world fell in love with it

If you have never played fantasy football before then you are missing out on something special. Fantasy football is the perfect way to make new friends at work, make watching football more exciting, and get the thrill of winning every week (even if your team is having a bad season).

If you’re a sports lover like us then it probably feels like fantasy football appeared overnight out of nowhere. But now we can’t imagine life without it. However, you may be shocked to learn that fantasy football was actually invented in 1962! And that it was created by Oakland Raiders fans living in New York…

Keep on reading to discover the history of fantasy football.

What is fantasy football?

Fantasy Football is a stats based gambling game. That can be played amongst a group of friends, colleagues, or online. The point tracking can be done by hand or you can use a website to work out and track everything for you.

A group of people agrees to create a league together. Each person drafts together a team from existing players in the NFL that year. They usually make a roster of 52 players (like the real NFL teams do). These players can be taken from any team in the league.

Each person puts forward a weekly team. The performance of each player is scored depending on how well they performed their role. These individual scores are added up and a team score is given. Over the season, all the weekly scores are added up and the person with the most points at the end of the season wins.

Some fantasy sports systems can be quite simple – like done on the number of points scored by a player. However, in football, not all players are given a chance to score. So each player can gain points in fantasy football for actions related to their position – for example, they may get points for an interception or a sack.

This system makes the choice of picking players a little more challenging. Putting together a really good defensive team could rack you up a lot of points. Each choice becomes much more important with this kind of system and we love it!

If you are interested in playing fantasy football then you can join

NFL daily fantasy sports here.

History of fantasy football

We challenge you to guess the original name of fantasy football…

Did any of you guess Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League? No, we thought not.

We can date the first fantasy football league back to the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League in 1962. It was created by a group of Oakland Raiders fans who were staying in a New York hotel and were trying to kill some time.

The game was very similar to what we know now. Each person would create their own fantasy NFL franchise based on the current NFL teams at the time. They would then be awarded points based on the success of their players.

The game is believed to have caught on by word of mouth.

In the following decade, a series of companies attempted to monetize the idea in the form of fantasy baseball. There were board games and trading cards that tried to recreate the system. None of this really caught on until the late 1990s when the internet became readily available.

Once the internet was up and running, it wasn’t long before people were making websites that would run people’s fantasy football leagues for them. The players would simply have to enter their team sheets and everything else would be done by the website. This prevented one member of the group from having to go through all the match statistics and adding up the scores.

The idea took off quickly and by 2010 the online fantasy sports business was making over $1 billion dollars every year. Some sportsbooks even began to offer payouts for the winning teams.

Fantasy sports started with football in America but it has spread around the world and into many different sports. It is particularly popular in Australia and the United Kingdom. If you have never played fantasy football before you need to correct that right now!

LEGALITY!

Wagering in sports is growing in popularity and is now legal in many parts of the U.S., which means more than one-third of Americans can participate without even having to leave their homes. It’s critical that those who choose to engage in it know the pertinent federal and local laws and, most importantly, do it responsibly.

You can learn more here: https://www.sportsbettingreport.com/