FanDuel popularized the concept of “daily” fantasy sports in 2009, three years before the launch of DraftKings, its main rival. But now, in time for the Sept. 7 kickoff of a new NFL season, the company is emphasizing a new “season-long” fantasy football product.
FanDuel’s new “Championship Leagues” will launch on Aug. 14, Yahoo Finance has learned. The feature represents FanDuel doubling down (a phrase it uses in its own press release) on season-long fantasy.
Here’s why that matters: it’s the latest indicator that daily fantasy sports (DFS) has not delivered on its hype.
The promise of DFS was that it is faster and more exciting than season-long fantasy football. Players can re-draft every day or week, enter new contests every day or week. No more waiting around all NFL season watching your bad team lose every week, trying to make trades here and there to improve.
But now the billion-dollar-valuation “unicorns” that catapulted this business have both launched versions of their product resembling the traditional, season-long fantasy football model that big players like ESPN, Yahoo, and CBS Sports have offered for more than a decade.
That’s not encouraging for the user acquisition potential of daily fantasy sports, the format many predicted could eventually be bigger than season-long fantasy. A report from Eilers & Krejcik Gaming found that the DFS market only grew by 4% in 2016; as a result, the firm reduced its projections for the future size of the market.
FanDuel’s new season-long NFL product
Last year, DraftKings and FanDuel both announced new features that place daily fantasy into a season-long context: they allow for weekly re-drafts, but within leagues that last all season. FanDuel called its product Friends Mode, and DraftKings called its version Leagues.
Now, FanDuel has expanded Friends Mode by creating Championship Leagues. CEO Nigel Eccles calls it “our big jump into the season-long fantasy market.”
What’s new: participants pay a one-time entry fee upfront at the beginning of the NFL season, just like in traditional fantasy football; FanDuel pays the grand prize winner at the end of the NFL season, just like in traditional fantasy football; and FanDuel has created a league chat mode so that you can trash-talk your friends, just like in traditional fantasy football.
But the contests run every week throughout the season. So every week, every player in the league re-drafts their squad. And the league commissioners can choose to allocate a prize for the weekly winner, which would get subtracted from the grand prize at the end of the season. And the leagues last into the NFL playoffs, rather than ending with the end of the regular season. These are DFS twists on the traditional fantasy football model.