How did #FPL derive from one bloke’s hobby to over 11 million players?
From Tony Blair’s school initiative to sports cars as prizes, welcome to the crazy, corrupt and often comical growth of online fantasy football...
From 1991 to 1994, Andrew Wainstein's "Fantasy League" rapidly progressed from 500 initial users to partnering with the Daily Telegraph and being promoted on the “Fantasy Football League” TV show presented by Baddiel & Skinner.
The less said about that show the better...
The first winner of the Telegraph’s (newspaper based) competition was actually a 14-year-old boy, who won two tickets to a match of his choice.
Forget Burnley vs Fulham: this lad picked the World Cup final in the US. Brazil won.
Fantasy League Ltd reportedly launched its web product in 1996, allowing users to kick their Mum's off the house phone to transfer in Fabrizio Ravanelli, but shockingly its first major success came with the School’s League in 1999.
270 schools and approximately 24,000 students joined for the first season, before tripling their numbers the following season.
The concept behind School's League was to use fantasy football to teach kids about maths, statistics, and presumably when is best to take a -4.
Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, and rumoured double gameweek lover, was quoted saying:
“The football may be a Fantasy, but the maths is for real…This is starting to make a real difference.”
Around this time, everybody's favourite newspaper 'The S*n' launched a web-based game called DreamTeamFC with a £100,000 prize.
Registration was available both online and via the phone for a fee of £5.
The winner of the £100,000 prize in the first season of DreamTeamFC was Christopher Hartley.
This must be a wild coincidence, but upon Googling his name, we discovered his namesake was murdered and had 100k cash stolen from his safe...
ISM, future creators of FPL, entered the market with an array of fantasy products including Formula 1, Tennis, and Golf.
“Ever wanted to partner Beckham and Zidane in your football midfield, or have Schumacher driving a Williams car?”
Of course you have. Actually, maybe not.
Their first foray into fantasy football was hosting the official UEFA Champions League fantasy game for the 1998-99 competition.
Anyone captain Solskjær or Sheringham in the final?
Just for nostalgia, here's a look at the most selected players from #UCLFantasy 2000-01.
Who are you picking?
It's the millennium! The clocks updated fine but the fantasy bug infected businesses who began an arms race for early market share.
Premier Win appeared out of nowhere, hosting a £1 million prize-pool backed by an aggressive £750,000 marketing campaign.
What could go wrong?
As I'm sure you may have predicted, Premier Win entered liquidation before the season ended. They did manage to pay out the first place and runner up prizes, but weekly and monthly prizes were abandoned.
Unfortunately, some things never change.
ISM launched 'Can You Kick It?' which many consider to be the origin of FPL.
15 player squad, capped budget, captaincies, private leagues, all sound familiar?
Over the years, CYKI also hosted a number of quirky one-off contests such as Fantasy Euro 2000 & Fantasy FA Cup 2008.
2 years later ISM would get the Premier League contract while lifting all the best ideas CYKI had into their new product.
CYKI fought on and continued alongside OfficialFPL for a decade but was discontinued in 2010-11 redirecting to FPL.
RIP CYKI, you walked so we could run.
Fantasy games were a rife in the early noughties.
Every competition you can imagine had a game designed around it.
For instance, here’s the most niche game we can find: Euro 2002 Under-21s Fantasy Football where the template pick was a young Andrea Pirlo.
I'd have played it.
Nothing epitomises this era’s fantasy football gold rush better than the 2002 World Cup. Every website was trying to lure in players with the best, or most outlandish, prize.
Step forward our winner, The Times with their prize of ‘a £61,000 Maserati 3200GT’.
To coincide with their 10 year anniversary, the Premier League decided the internet was not a fad and launched their own official website.
And with this website came the official Fantasy Premier League game that we know today.
They're probably still using the same servers.
If you enjoyed this thread, please consider signing up to our free FPL newsletter.
We send a weekly email packed full of everything you need to know, plus occasional football related nonsense like this.
Join 20,000+ other managers: lazyfpl.com/subscribe?utm_…
Want to read more?
The research and imagery in this thread were sourced here:
fpltips.com/the-online-era…
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.