Fantasy football (association)
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.
Fantasy football (American)
The first national fantasy football competition, Pigskin Playoff, was developed in 1989 by Lee Marc, Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos of Phoneworks who teamed with a West Coast Ad Agency (Wakeman & deForest) to launch the game in 1990 in a number of newspapers throughout the country including the Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, Press Democrat. Archives of Pigskin Playoff are available online and in most public libraries . Pigskin Playoff is what current Daily Fantasy Sports are modeled after in that it was the first game to allow significantly large numbers of participants to compete against one another for prizes and more importantly converted football statistics into a simple scoring system. Participants created a team of NFL players, earned stats for those players based on actual performance, traded those players on a daily basis, and accrued points in an effort to compete against one another to win prizes. The group filed and was awarded US Patents 5,018,736A and 5,263,723A, for Interactive Game System and Method; Interactive Contest System.