Picture the scene; you’re doing your Fantasy Premier League team selection at the last minute on a Friday afternoon, and you’re unsure whether your star striker is going to be fit for his side’s match on Saturday. There’s just one problem: you have no way of verifying his fitness until Saturday’s newspapers are published. And instead of confirming your team’s changes with a swipe of your finger on an app, you have to phone them in before the deadline.
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Desperate times call for desperate measures. You contact the Premier League club the striker plays for and pretend to be a local journalist. Somehow you get through to the assistant manager, who tells you the forward will be available to play tomorrow. You call up the fantasy football company and confirm your team for that weekend with a person on the other end of the line, smug in the knowledge you have gained an advantage over your rivals.
If that sounds like overkill — because, well, it is — it’s also proof of the dedication shown by fantasy football players in the game’s early days in the UK The above story is real — it happened in the 1990s in the league of Tim Benson, a business consultant, when a Liverpool striker was doubtful for the weekend.
That analogue version of fantasy football could not be further from today’s official Premier League product, played by almost 11 million users around the world, including armchair pundits, chess grandmasters and top-flight players themselves. For the game’s early adopters such as Benson, however, the version where friends held draft-style auctions for fantasy players in person, phoned in or faxed their team changes and only knew their total points the following Tuesday will always hold a special allure.
“A friend of mine said it summed it up perfectly when he was in his kitchen and a game was on,” Benson told ESPN. “He only realised how important the whole thing was to him when he [was] shouting out to his wife: ‘Who crossed the ball for a Wigan goal?’ … Nobody cares, but of course we care — because it matters.”
That will be a feeling familiar to many virtual managers. With the Premier League ready to kick off again after the 2022 World Cup and fans turning their attention back to their fantasy teams for the second half of the season, this is the story of how the game first captured the imagination of English fans — and paved the way for the global phenomenon it is today.
