Is fantasy football in Britain actually holding back the real thing?

Liverpool and Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry gained an insight into the benefits of sabermetrics by playing fantasy baseball

England and America: Two nations separated by a common love of fantasy sport

George Bernard Shaw once said that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. Strangely, the same thing can probably be said of the two nations' love of fantasy sports. And British football (i.e. the Premier League and Football Leagues) may be suffering as a result.

Living and working as an online sports journalist in the UK, I am highly aware not only of the British obsession with all things football, but also of the way that this passion is often understood through a prism of 'fantasy' football.

Whether at work, where we have a hotly-contested office 'mini-league', or playing social football with a diverse bunch of mates on the weekend, I am always slightly surprised by the extent to which news and results are evaluated and discussed solely on the impact they have on one's fantasy team.

Arsenal's Jack Wilshere goes down with another injury and the thoughts go immediately not to the impact on England's attempts to qualify for the next major tournament but rather to whether I have enough substitutions remaining to get him out of my line-up; Chelsea and Manchester City play out an incredibly tedious 0-0 draw, but I'm delighted because Joe Hart's clean-sheet helps keep me in contention; and most predictably of all, Manchester United's Robin van Persie bangs in a hat-trick against lowly Hull and everyone can celebrate because they all designated him to be their captain this week and therefore earned double points for each of his goals.

I do not live, and never have lived, in the United States but I do participate in fantasy sports leagues based on American sports, and I am very much under the impression that fantasy teams in the States are equally pervasive in the way sports are consumed in that country, if not more so.

Not only do almost all the major sports networks have their own fantasy leagues across all the major sports in the US (not unlike in Britain) but there are also websites (such as Rotoworld) dedicated soley to providing news and advice to fantasy sport participants.

Fantasy Sports have leaked into popular culture with television sitcoms such as 'The League', and sports journalists such as Grantland's Bill Simmons regularly referencing their involvement in fantasy sports leagues. 

But it doesn't stop there. In 1999 the Fantasy Sports Trade Association was established to represent the fantasy sports industry in the United States. Today, the Association claims to represent 140 member companies with a reach of over 33 million adult Americans.

In 2006, a study estimated that fantasy sports had a $3–$4 billion annual economic impact across the sports industry in the US. It is likely to be significantly greater than that now given the way fantasy sports has grown in the last 20 years, largely thanks to the internet.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of similar statistics for the United Kingdom although according to a 2008 study by Ipsos, the number of British fantasy sports players aged 16–64 is estimated to range between 5.5 and 7.5 million.

In short, this is big business on both sides of the Atlantic.

But in very important ways the British and American approaches to fantasy sports couldn't be more different and it just might be holding back football in the UK.

The differences between US and UK fantasy sports

In the UK, fantasy football almost universally consists of starting out with a 'budget' and then assembling a squad whereby players are attributed values. Whilst there may occasionally be limits imposed as to the number of players you can have from one real team, there are generally very few parameters aside from making sure the accumulated values of people in your squad do not exceed your budget.

How crafty a manager needs to be relates solely to the relationship between the value of the players in that league and the generosity of the allowed budget (i.e. it is a lot harder to justify selecting Robin van Persie as one of your eleven squad members when valued at £15m if your total budget is £60m than if your total budget is £100m).

To a certain extent, this approach is designed to reflect the way British football operates, with managers being handed a budget to spend on acquisitions and then, with the exception of Arsene Wenger at Arsenal (sorry, Gunners fans), actually spending that money to bring in the best players available in each position.

Likewise, American fantasy sports reflects the way sports work in the States with a draft system (like that used to distribute athletes graduating from college sports to the professional franchises) being a much more common means of assembling a team.

This means that a 'mini-league' is established in advance and then the managers in that league take turns at picking players to make up their squad, with each player only being able to be picked once.

This eliminates a common phenomena in many British fantasy football leagues (at least in my experience) where many teams, even in a mini-league, will have several of the same players.

As I alluded to earlier, a player like Robin van Persie who is a frequent goalscorer for Manchester United (last year's Premier League champions), currently gets selected by a large proportion of fantasy teams in the UK.

While this no doubt adds to the collective sense of success whenever Van Persie does well, he provides essentially no competitive advantage to any one team because he is owned by so many. Any points he accumulates for your team are cancelled out by the fact that most other teams in your league also benefited from his goalscoring exploits.

Under a draft system only one player per mini-league could own Van Persie and the rest of the league would have to try an assemble a squad without him. On the flip side, whichever team ended up with Van Persie would likely be denied other elite fantasy players (say, Sergio Aguero or Eden Hazard) as they would be chosen by other members of the league.

In my fantasy NBA (Basketball) league this means that only one member is privileged to have LeBron James as part of their squad in any given season, but if you don't get James you could still get Kevin Durant, Chris Paul or some other almost equally good player to build your squad around.

As a brief aside, I should note that many fantasy sports leagues in the States also use an 'auction' system as an alternative to a draft whereby league members have a budget and bid against each other to acquire a certain player for their team. Whilst I don't have much experience of using this system myself, the basic premise - that each real-life player can only be selected for one fantasy team in a mini-league at any given time - still applies.

Head-to-head competition based on statistical categories

There is however one further important difference between American and UK fantasy sports that is truly holding back an analytical revolution in British football.

Interestingly, fantasy sports in Australia is caught somewhere in between the American and the British model.

This past season I took part in a fantasy NRL (Australian rugby league) mini-league where we employed a draft and whilst I think everyone recognised the benefit of having a unique squad, the competition still lacked some of the lustre of the American fantasy leagues with which I am involved.

Part of the reason for this is that many fantasy league members lose interest in actually managing their team after the initial thrill of selecting a squad and are content to just watch their total points accumulate largely irrespective of how they are doing relative to anyone else in their 'mini-league'.

American fantasy sports circumvent this problem by eliminating total points and pitting league members against each other across a range of statistical categories on a weekly basis.

In my NBA fantasy league for example, every week I compete against a different member of the league across nine statistical categories. In basketball, these are things like points, rebounds, three-pointers made, free-throw percentage etc.

I do not accumulate total points for each of these things. Instead, they only matter relative to how the fantasy team I am competing against is doing that week. I am trying to outdo my opponent in as many of those statistical categories as possible. A 'win' is when I beat my opponent in five or more out of the nine categories.

This opens up a whole new world of complexity and tactics that (in my experience) keeps league members engaged, often obsessively, throughout the season.

Hypothetically, I'm up against Player X this week and I know his team (made up of a completely different set of players than my own) are particularly strong in categories 1, 2, and 3. Therefore if I want to win this week I need to tinker with my squad to ensure that I can compete in statistical categories 4, 5, and 6 and, for example, hope for some luck in categories 7, 8 and 9.

In fantasy football goals remain paramount, with lesser points usually available for assists, clean sheets and negative points for yellow and red cards.

However, given the wealth of statistical data now available it would be easy to come up with a number of categories, in which fantasy teams could compete against each other each week.

In addition to goals, assists, clean-sheets and cards you could add shots on target, pass completion rates, tackles and even things like crosses, successful 'take-ons' and playing time (all available via Opta).

Moneyball and the rise of statistical data

There was a time in the not too distant past that many British football fans were of the view that the only "statistic" (said with derision) that mattered was the score.

They sneered (sometimes rightly so) at some of the terminology employed by American "soccer" commentators, including the idea that someone could "assist" on a goal.

However, perhaps in a sign of the influence of fantasy football in the UK, the idea of an assist has become much more commonplace in the sport. It is still unlikely to be referred to in live commentary in this country, but with many fantasy leagues incorporating points for an assist, the term has filtered into the popular consciousness and gained some esteem.

Indeed, the rise of companies like Opta and ProZone means there is now a wealth of statistical data available for football stretching far beyond the basic things like goalscorers, bookings and corner kicks.

Several attempts to explain the success of the Spanish national football team (relative to other nations like England) has lead journalists and fans alike to look into statistics about percentage of possession and pass completion statistics.

Much as Arsene Wenger has been credited with revolutionising player diets after banning the traditional pre-match meal of baked beans and Coca-Cola after arriving at Arsenal in 1996, Sam Allardyce has been credited with leading the statistical revolution in British football, using ProZone to analyse player and team data to refine his managerial craft at Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn and most recently West Ham.

As Tottenham boss Andre Villas-Boas has pointed out, Allardyce's statistical interpretations haven't always lead to the most attractive brand of football and have often failed to endear him to club owners and fans, but they have resulted in largely impressive results.

Meanwhile, Liverpool (with a little help from Brad Pitt) are the club that has brought the concept of 'Moneyball' to the attention of many British football followers after being purchased by the Fenway Sports Group (FSG) in 2010.

Moneyball, for the uninitiated, is a book by the exceptional financial journalist Michael Lewis that follows Major League Baseball team the Oakland Athletics in their pursuit to remain competitive through the use of 'sabermetrics' (essentially advanced in-game statistics).

As well as being a highly entertaining read, and now a film (starring the aforementioned Pitt), the book helped popularised A's (as the Athletics are often called) manager Billy Beane's approach and documented the reduction in competitive advantage as bigger teams like the FSG-owned Boston Red Sox also adopted a more statistically-based approach.

Since 2010 there has therefore been a lot of media speculation about the extent to which FSG would try to implement a similar approach in British football at Liverpool, particularly given the competitive advantage that may exist in the short term in an environment where other teams were not paying as much attention to statistics.

Earlier this year Liverpool managing director Ian Ayre clarified the club's transfer policy, stating that they were relying on statistical information a lot more, but denied the term Moneyball had ever been used internally at the club in an interview with American publication Sports Illustrated.

The origins of Moneyball

Something that is often overlooked in all of this are the origins of sabermetrics in the first place. 

Bill James is credited with being one of the pioneers of the statistical revolution in professional sports and coined the term sabermetrics after SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. 

James, who is now a Senior Advisor on Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox, started out self-publishing an annual journal entitled The Bill James Baseball Abstracts after becoming frustrated with his attempts to get newspaper editors to publish his unconventional articles before gaining greater popularity.

James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball" as he sought to answer questions like  "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense last season?".  

Indeed, James is credited with creating a number of new statistical categories in baseball as part of his attempts to comprehensively answer such questions.

But according to Lewis in Moneyball, it was Bill James' desire to beat his friends in fantasy baseball that was his "chief motive for his original rethinking of the game".

As Lewis describes it, fantasy baseball lead the fans to become more keenly interested in the information they needed to make intelligent baseball decisions.

Lewis writes: "They needed [good information], or they thought they needed it, to win their fantasy games."

Fascinatingly, Lewis goes on to detail how John W. Henry, the principle owner of both the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club (as part of FSG), was not only a keen reader of James and his Abstracts but also continued to take part in a sophisticated fantasy baseball league even after taking control of the Red Sox.

According to Lewis, Henry employed "Jamesean tools" (i.e. sabermetrics) and "cleaned up"in his fantasy league every year but initially failed to employ the same thinking in his running of the actual baseball club he ran before seeing the error of his ways.

The crux

Importantly, this is where English football is missing a beat. American sports essentially crowd-sourced a statistical revolution by harnessing the true potential of fantasy sports.

Seemingly ordinary people across America with otherwise no interest in maths were and are spending hours every week pouring over statistical data about athletes in a bid to beat their friends in a fantasy league.

The particularly obsessive or mathematically inclined may go on to develop that interest in the same way that James did, to the point where he now holds an esteemed position one of the biggest sporting franchises in the world (and has been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame).

In the NBA in particular there has been a recent swathe of fresh, young General Managers and coaches being appointed to teams on the back of their reputation in statistical analytics, and whilst this is not to say that these individuals are not unusually talented and intelligent, I suspect that many of them first developed their passion for sports-based statistics in much the same way as James did - the desire to get the upper hand over a group of friends in a fantasy league.

In recent times there has been a bit of a pushback against the statistical revolution, with many suggesting that even advanced statistics can never compare to good old-fashioned scouting and 'the eye-test'.

But as new Philadelphia 76ers boss Sam Hinkie points out, and as Ian Ayres mentions in the interview with Sports Illustrated, in the hugely competitive world of professional sports, statistics may not be everything but you would be foolish to ignore them in your search for even the slightest advantage over your rivals.

It may be that British football has simply skipped the fantasy step having learnt from their American counterparts and now employ all of the same statistics anyway.

But it seems that the game in this country does itself a disservice by overlooking an opportunity to get literally millions of minds thinking in a more in-depth way about the sport they already love.

This is not to say that every fantasy football manager would become a Bill James or a Billy Beane were we only to change the format, but I wonder how many brilliant minds have been lost to football clubs in this country through the lack of something to really engage with.

Although I am far from a brilliant mind, we are only three weeks into the current Premier League season and already I have lost interest in my fantasy team, largely because it is irrelevant how many goals van Persie scores because my team is nearly identical to everyone elses and I'll keep on accumulating points irrespective of how much attention I pay it.

Some might say that now I can go back to focussing on what really matters - the actual results of the actual games.

But for a Liverpool, and to an even greater extent a Norwich, a Crystal Palace or other smaller clubs throughout the league system, wouldn't it be of even greater benefit if I (and thousands of others) was spending my time trying to find a less coveted player at another club who offers me essentially the same thing as van Persie?

The Economist recently published some very interesting statistical data that looked at over 190 different types of tackle, pass and shot for more than 500 players and were able to show, for example, that Gareth Bale could be suitably replaced at Tottenham by either Manchester United's Danny Welbeck (somewhat unexpected) or Southampton's Gaston Ramirez (a much cheaper alternative).

This is a very interesting development but I imagine this information would have been known much sooner and more widely had fantasy football managers been genuinely required to look for an alternative to Bale rather than just blindly slotting him into their line-ups much like everyone else.

So what?

There are any number of fantasy football leagues currently running in the UK (and some based in the States) but none currently offer the American model of fantasy sports as outlined above.

I accept that a lot of fantasy football fans are comfortable with the format they currently use and the mere thought of a draft and statistical categories is both overwhelming and abhorrent, but surely there is not a lot to lose by one of the big operators at least offering an alternative, as well as if not instead of what they currently offer.

The model is there and if it doesn't take off it could quickly be scrapped.

If nothing else, I'm surprised that John W. Henry has not pushed for this more himself. Not only does he have the media connections to make it work (he also owns the Boston Globe), he knows first hand both the joy and the potential benefits to sporting franchises of a more advanced fantasy sports game.

Liverpool may be trying to downplay the Moneyball tag, but in doing so maybe they should think about whether they are in fact holding back both the future of the club and football in general in Britain.