Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What's fantasy football?
Fantasy football is a game in which the participants serve as the general managers of virtual professional gridiron football teams. The competitors choose their team rosters by participating in a draft in which all players of a real football league are available. Points are based on the actual performances of the players in the real-world competition. The game typically involves the National Football League, Canadian Football League or college football.
For years, the popularity of fantasy football grew slowly. In 1976, several high school students held their first draft and in 2017 their league, Coach the Pros, will have their 42nd draft, making them the longest continuously operating fantasy football league in the world.[3]
The explosive popularity of fantasy sports, coupled with the availability of venues showcasing numerous live football games via satellite, has had significant effects on football viewing and rooting habits among participants. Fantasy sports players watch more game telecasts, buy more tickets and spend money at stadiums at a much higher rate than general sports fans. For example, 55 percent of fantasy sports players report watching more sports on television since they started playing fantasy sports.[37] Fantasy participants also are reported to attend 0.22 to 0.57 more NFL games in person per season.[38] The NFL entered into a reported five-year, $600 million deal in 2006 with Sprint that was driven at least in part because of fantasy sports, allowing subscribers to draft and monitor their teams with their cellphones.[39] Many sports and football-related sports news shows discuss fantasy-related topics. Besides the fictional The League, multiple TV programs that focus on fantasy football news exist; examples include ESPN's Fantasy Football Now and CBS's Fantasy Football Today.
Oulala Fantasy Football was a web-based fantasy football (or fantasy soccer) game. The game consisted of a typical, traditional fantasy football setup allowing the player to pick real life footballers to make up their fantasy football squad each week. Their fantasy team scored points based on how the players they've picked performed in their real life matches. The game could be played for free or for cash prizes in a poker-style entry fee format. 
Other competitions include Fox Sport's Fantasy AFL, Yahoo!7's AFL Football Fantasy, Footytips, Ultimate Footy and FantasyFooty.net.au (formally My Fantasy Footy).
In 2014, Fantasy Football expert Ash Kernsworth, writer and broadcaster Craig Hazell and comedian Tom Holmes began recording podcasts during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The following August, they began an accompanying mini-league on the official Premier League fantasy football website. While the content of the podcast consists of general fantasy football discussion, specifics such as prices of players and league positions are specific to the Fantasy Premier League game.
The fantasy football community has been one of the driving forces in the evolution of advanced metrics in American football. Fantasy sports writer, and author of "How To Think Like A Fantasy Football Winner", C.D. Carter is a leading advocate for the use of advanced metrics in fantasy football analysis. He and peers at XN Sports, NumberFire, and the long-form fantasy football analysis site, Rotoviz.com, have established an informal subculture of fantasy football sports writers who refer to themselves as "degens." The degen movement is responsible for the creation of numerous American football efficiency metrics that better explain past football performances and attempt to predict future player production. Height-adjusted Speed Score, College Dominator Rating, Target Premium, Catch Radius, Net Expected Points (NEP), and Production Premium were recently created and disseminated by degen writers and mathematicians. Building on the work of these writers, sites such as PlayerProfiler.com distill a wide variety of established advanced metrics into a single player snapshot designed to be palatable to the casual sports fan.
In August 2013, Oulala Fantasy Football launched on the premise it was the first fantasy football (or fantasy soccer) game to include an extensive scoring matrix as opposed to the normal 5 to 10 that most other games operate, thus supposedly making it a true skill fantasy football management game.
Fantasy football has also created several complementary and derivative industries. Team managers will spend on subscription-based information sites such as rotoworld.com, draftsharks.com and Football Guys to gain an informational advantage. Fantasy leagues may also engage services to make their things run smoothly and settle disputes. Leagues may deposit collected fees with fantasy football specific escrow companies, and settle disputes regarding trades or scoring by using lawyer-run fantasy football arbitration websites for a flat fee per resolution. The excitement of drafting a team each year has led to a new derivative of fantasy football: Day or week leagues, which offer the opportunity to draft a new team and play a single game each week. Fantasy football has worked its way into pop culture with an estimated $1.67 billion contributed to the economy as of 2012.[34] TV sitcoms about groups of friends playing each other in fantasy football, cable networks dedicating blocks of programming specifically to fantasy football, 24/7 satellite radio channels reporting fantasy news, and services designed to provide team managers with alerts about their player’s status to their phones.[31]
Fantasy football is a fantasy sport in which competitors score points based on the performance of players in the Australian Football League. The two biggest competitions are the Herald Sun's Supercoach competition and the AFL's Dream Team competition. Both games are designed and run by Vapormedia.
Fantasy football may refer to one of the following fantasy sports:
One of the largest sources of revenue in fantasy football is ad revenue. Driven mostly by sports sites, revenue generated by ads on fantasy football programming is estimated at $2 to $5 billion annually.[30] Ad rates vary greatly, and many content providers aren’t willing to give specific details on what they charge, but sites can charge an estimated $2–$10 per thousand page views.[31] The advertising revenue can be especially lucrative because fantasy team managers are such heavy internet users. They create, on average, 4 times more page views than those that don’t play fantasy sports.[32] Advertising isn’t limited to just sports sites and television. Demand for fantasy football information has spread to mobile applications, which carry banner ads at the bottom or top of each screen.
An emerging variant is club-based fantasy football in which participants select players from within their own club. Participating clubs typically have more than one football team and adopt club fantasy football to increase communication and banter between teams. Some clubs charge a nominal amount for players to enter a team and either use the proceeds as a fundraiser or to fund the fantasy league prizes. Club fantasy football leagues tend to be less sophisticated than the national variety since most clubs run them on a spreadsheet. Niche sports websites now offer online versions with both paid and free versions available.
The standard fantasy football scoring system comprises a well-respected baseline of statistic/point-value pairs designed to promote balance across the various fantasy positions.[21] This is the typical scoring configuration chosen by first time fantasy football commissioners because it is a very basic points system which is fair and intuitive for fantasy novices.
Many leagues are composed of friends, family, co-workers and even strangers that are in the fantasy league to prove who is the greatest "couch coach". Millions of dollars are won and lost each year in fantasy league betting. Some leagues are managed by players in the leagues while other leagues are run by independent businesses.[25] The Federal government has determined that fantasy league gambling is not a "game of chance" and as such is not illegal, however, alterations to the rules can cause a fantasy league to skew too far into chance and lose federal protection. At the state level, many states, including Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and Vermont have banned certain activities related to fantasy football, such as collection of league fees and payout of winnings, when done so online.[26] Florida has an outright ban on all fantasy football, though how the ban is enforced appears to be unclear. Fantasy football continues unabated in all of these states, so it appears none of these regulations have any effect.[27]
Daily Fantasy Sports Fantasy auto racing Fantasy baseball Fantasy basketball Fantasy Congress - an online simulation sport using the results of congressional activity by the US Senate and House Fantasy cricket Fantasy football (American) Fantasy football (Australian rules football) Fantasy football (Association) Fantasy golf Fantasy hockey Fantasy sports stock simulations Fantasy professional wrestling
The economic impacts of fantasy football are vast in number and value. Most of the impacts are positive on the economy overall, but there are some relatively minor drawbacks. Growth rates in fantasy football showed no signs of slowing down over the past few years.[30] While team managers are drawn to fantasy football because they can get started and play for free, they are still likely to spend on many of fantasy football's complementary industries.
In 1997, CBS launched the beta version of the first publicly available free fantasy football website. The game immediately became widely popular. Within three years, all major sports media websites launched competing fantasy football hosting websites. The NFL released their own official game in 2010, NFL.com Fantasy Football, further driving industry growth. Fantasy football is now the single most important marketing tool for the NFL. Today, it is estimated over 19 million people compete in public and private leagues online nationally.[10]
FanXT provides platforms for multiple fantasy sports including Premier League Fantasy, Champions League, Spanish Liga, MotoGP, and the Fantasy F1. They are also the official providers of fantasy football platforms for Finland Veikkausliga, Hong Kong First Division Football League, India I-League, Philippines United Football League and Singapore S.League.
Fantazzle offers fantasy football, fantasy baseball, fantasy soccer, fantasy basketball, fantasy golf, fantasy racing, fantasy hockey, fantasy poker, and fantasy games for March Madness. In 2011, Fantazzle became one of the first daily fantasy sports websites to offer college football fantasy games. Fantazzle also added fantasy games for the Lingerie Football League in 2011.
In the event that fantasy sports are not deemed to be a form of sports wagering, then states may have a role in determining their legality. Under most state laws, lotteries are illegal only if they involve three elements: an entry fee (known as "consideration"), a prize (a "reward", in legal terms) and chance. Whether fantasy sports are a lottery varies from state to state and hinges on the definition of "chance" that the state interprets. For some states, if skill dominates the outcome of the event, then the contest is legal, and passes what's called the "dominant factor test". Other states with a stricter definition of chance, called "any chance test", have made fantasy football illegal.[69]
Fantasy football (less commonly referred to as fantasy association football worldwide but known as fantasy soccer in the United States) is a game in which participants assemble an imaginary team of real life footballers and score points based on those players' actual statistical performance or their perceived contribution on the field of play. Usually players are selected from one specific division in a particular country, although there are many variations. The original game was created in England by Bernie Donnelly on Saturday 14 August 1971 and is still going strong 45 years later. Fantasy football has evolved in recent years from a simple recreational activity into a significant business due to exposure via the internet.
The format was originally heavily reliant on an actual fantasy football league, made up of teams picked by regular guest celebrities at the point that the game became popular in the mid-1990s. Each week, one or more of the celebrities would appear on the show and chat about football and their fantasy line-ups. As the show progressed on television, however, the fantasy league was pushed to the background in favour of sketches and clips, and was eventually dropped altogether. The latter shows still had guest appearances, from the likes of Nick Hornby, Damon Albarn, Peter Cook etc., although the departure of the fantasy team format meant it was less essential the guests had a decent football knowledge than before.
Fantasy football is a genre of board game or wargame which normally involves two teams of fantasy races (such as elves, dwarves or orcs) competing in an extremely violent variant of gridiron football. Often the only resemblance to gridiron football for many fantasy football games is to get the ball into an end zone or goal, but these games still fall under the fantasy football genre.
Some Fantasy Football leagues wager things other than money, such as the loser of the league has to get a tattoo, and that tattoo has to be of what the winner of the league wants. The only thing that the loser gets any say in is the location of the tattoo. The owners of the teams have to sign a contract before the season to agree to the punishment if they lose.[28] Other high-stakes leagues offer prizes of US$250,000 to the ultimate champion.