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.
Daily fantasy sports
The earliest records of daily fantasy trace back to 1990. The first national fantasy baseball and football competitions, Dugout Derby and Pigskin Playoff, developed by Lee Marc, Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos of Phoneworks who teamed with West Coast Ad Agency (Wakeman & deForest). The daily fantasy games were launched in 1990 in a number of newspapers throughout the country including the Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, Press Democrat, Hartford Courant, Tampa Bay Times, Morning Call, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun Times. Hundreds of thousands of readers played in the daily fantasy games. Archives of Dugout Derby and Pigskin Playoff are available online and in most public libraries. These games were the first to allow significantly large numbers of participants to compete against one another for prizes. They were the first to convert baseball and football statistics into a simple scoring system and were awarded US Patents 5,018,736A and 5,263,723A, for Interactive Game System and Method; Interactive Contest System.