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After a busy summer of sports with the European Championships, Copa America and Paris Olympics, normality has resumed over the weekend with the return of the Premier League season. And with that, the fantasy football season also gets underway. After a month of everyone switching and changing their teams ahead of the Manchester United vs Fulham kick-off Friday evening. And fantasy football will be the topic of the conversation today. as I'm joined by Insider Sports' editor, Ted Armclay, and Casino Beats' senior journalist, and I believe last year's SBC fantasy winner, Danny Lee, to discuss what operators are doing to target fantasy football. Welcome both. How were both your weekends now the sports have resumed? Danny? Yeah, yeah, good weekend. Well, on the Liverpool side of things, and you are right. This is the SBC FBL champion of last year. Not gonna speak about. Not gonna big that up too much though after this weekend, but yeah, nice to see Liverpool get the first win under Arna slot. As you know I'm a Liverpool fan, but also support Bradford City, and they drew 0-0, so a bit of a boring game there. I did see that goal line clearance, well, sorry, GOAL LINE CLEARANCE on Bradford over the weekend. Miles over the line, mate, miles over the line. I'm just looking at the SPC league table now to see where you actually are after the first game weekend. And you are... are you seventh? That's not bad. Yeah, not terrible, but... You know, there's another game to play tonight and that might not do me many favors with Spurs playing and me having no Spurs players. Yeah, I mean, Joe Streeter just got lucky at the top with... he's got Saka, his captain, EZak. Yeah, he's had a good weekend. Yeah, how's EZak got 20 points? Oh, it's 10. Sorry. I can't even see the screen. My bad. Yeah. He's had a really good weekend. And Ted, you okay? Yeah, I'm good. Thanks, mate. Yeah. It's a funny one. I'm not even, I'm not a man who lives and breathes football, but it is really noticeable how much structure it provides your weekend, isn't it? When the, when the Premier League comes back. For even the most casual football fan, I think it's always sorely missed during that couple of months in the summer. So yeah, good to have the return of it. Yeah. As a guy who's had to deal with fatherhood last year, this is... I think the first proper summer where I've not had like football to occupy myself while looking after my child. So now it's come back. I was just like, yes. I was watching the Chelsea Man City game. Well Ben was just running around the garden and I was just like, yeah, this is perfect. You can play with his water and sand. This could be a good marketing shot for the Premier League this, like Premier League parenting assistance. Thank you. Is it Richard Scoot? No, it's not Richard Scoot anymore, is it? Who's the head of the Premier League now? Richard Masters, isn't it? Richard Masters. Richard Masters, as always Richard. Thank you, Richard Masters. Cool, so we're gonna talk about, as you can tell, fantasy football and just what operators are now starting to do because there's more attention being focused onto the UK version of fantasy football. I know it's a huge thing with daily fantasy football in the US. So we're gonna look at what's gonna happen, what they're doing. how it kind of compares to the US and maybe some of the things that operators need to kind of concern themselves with. But before we do, we've already briefly touched on it. How did we do this weekend, Danny? Um, yeah, fairly poor in terms of things. Not too bad. Pretty middle of the ground, I think. Middle of the road, sorry. I think Captain Inharland pulled me through a little bit but- I did feel bad not having Salah in my team after he played really well on Saturday morning. Yeah, I was back and forth to include Harland or to include Salah and the only reason I included Harland is because of the new shots on target bonus points rules that have come in and I just thought not including him would be a long-term mistake even though I was kind of biting my tongue a bit with Salah's performance and I think I'm quite lucky because I've still got... Solanke and Kulasevski to play today. So I'm hoping to make some ground up on the top five of the SBC Leaders League. Ted, you actually did alright. You're just above me by two points. Yeah, I did. I had a half decent weekend on it. I was really expecting to do a lot worse. I'm not the guru of fantasy football that our good mate Danny is. Yeah, I think like Danny, I kind of benefited from captain in Harland as I think many other people did. But alongside some other people, I think I did suffer from the absence of Ivan Toney from the Brentford game yesterday. I think that let me down. But yeah, overall not a bad start. I've had much worse starts to fantasy football than this. Yeah. Again, I'm looking at your team. Did Kyle Walker start all weekend? You didn't know Rico Lewis has been playing hasn't he? Yeah, so you're in line to get four additional points because you've got... Bollie in defence who can replace Walker and then... John McGinn on the bench as well. John McGinn. Super McGinn to give you another two points to replace Tony. So you're looking quite tired here. Yeah, not bad. Like I say, I think this is the most confident I've been in my selections to be honest because yeah, usually I'm abysmal at fantasy football. Although I would also add that my points are still below the national average by one point. I think I got 49 this week and the average is 50. Again, no, because you haven't had the additional four points. Yeah. Good point. So you'd slight at the moment, it will change tonight. At the moment, you're slightly above the average. Well, I'm three points below the average, but with two players in hand, so come on Solanke and Kulisovsky. No, no, come on. Let's wish Lester a good return to the premier league and see Tottenham get beat tonight. That'd be nice. No, there'll be no Jamie Vardy party. Before we jump into the topic at hand, it's now time to do a shout out to OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. I wonder what fantasy football team they would put together. Anyone got any ideas? There's probably some form of AI powered solution that could figure out which team is statistically the best to pick out. In fact, there is. There's a, I was seeing that on TikTok, there's a lot of people who pick their teams and then you put it through an AI generator and it gives them a rank out of a hundred. So that was, that would be how OptiMove would do their team. If listeners out there, if you still want to get a first three month of OptiMove, visit optimove.com forward slash SBC. And I will leave the links in the description below. Right, away from the fun talk of what we were doing with our fantasy football team this weekend and onto the serious matter. And that's. looking at more about how operators on the B2B side of the industry can kind of look to utilize fantasy football. And Ted, I'm going to come to you because you're the insider sport editor, you're a sports guru, I would say. What's currently on offer for fantasy football that operators are kind of looking into or honing into? Well, I think the biggest market to look at really, I know we're talking about UK fantasy here. You can't really talk about this without looking to the US. That's really the biggest example of it. I mean, from what we understand, from what we remember, DraftKings and Fanjul were obviously the two market leaders in the US. Fanjul, the number one market leader followed by DraftKings. Both of those have a quite long history and a long pedigree in fantasy sports, going back from before, before they were betting operators really. Daily fantasy sports in the US is huge, I think, particularly for the NFL and the NBA. So that's really where we sort of see a lot of the best example of the crossover between it, I think, is those companies. I think really what operators in the UK could look at is the benefits that fantasy football really poses, and fantasy sports in general, to be fair. Obviously, you know, football isn't the only sport that has fantasy stuff. You can do fantasy rugby and things like that as well. It's really the fan engagement tool side of it that's really the big benefit of... of just keeping people constantly engaged with your brand and what you're offering. I think maybe as well if you look at just the sheer amount of people who play Fantasy Premier League, that's an incredible amount of player data that people can harness and really use to learn more about their customers and what their preferences are. Have they got, are there any particular players that they follow a lot? Are there any particular teams they follow a lot? Obviously, you know... most people's fantasy teams, they'll probably include three players from their own team, you know, their hometown team, their childhood team or whatever, just sort of have a sense of loyalty. So I guess that sort of gives you a bit of a fuller picture of a customer. And yeah, and that's like, and like I said, just the overall fan engagement aspect. Yeah. Sorry, I'm looking at our team again to see how many Nottingham Forest players you've got in there. And you've got Hudson Adair, you've got Ward. I've also just realised, you're only on defenders. Yeah, I had a bit of a shocker when it came to defence at the weekend. Look at that, it's Chris Wood though. Chris Wood got me nine points though, so I was glad to include him. I knew he'd turn something over. I was debating including Woods. And interesting points, unlike you said, you can't look at the UK without looking at the US because it's the foundation of like what the UK should be looking into and kind of how to utilise this. And I think in essence of this, from a UK's perspective, when you look at the US, I don't know. It would be good to have kind of Jess on here, Jessica Wilman, SBC America's editor, to clarify this, but maybe daily fantasy football is so big in the US because it took so long for them to kind of regulate online betting in certain states. That's definitely, yeah, I think that's definitely a huge reason behind it. The fact that betting was for many years in the US so closed off with the exception of a couple of states, obviously Nevada, New Jersey and so on, these sort of heartland states. Yeah, fantasy football is kind of, I guess, was the replacement for that. for people to engage with the sport whilst in the UK we've had betting since, you know, legal off-track betting since what, 1960 I think. So there's always, yeah, there's never been that gap to be filled whilst fantasy over here is more of just, it's still engagement but it's very separated off from betting, isn't it? Whilst in the US, there seems to be a bit more of a connection between the two in some cases. on that app specifically because we have to acknowledge, you know, it's, you can make a fantasy team at the age of 13 and you can actually make one under 13 if you have flight parental consent. So I don't want to touch too much on that because we want to focus on the gambling, the BTCP element. So I wanted to kind of shift the focus a bit to something called a fanteam.com. And Daniella, you actually put me onto this. Annoyingly, I missed out on signing up on the season long one on Friday because I was just too busy. But. It's an interesting concept and something that has really piqued my interest moving forward for the season. So can you just kind of explain what thefanteam.com is and how in a way it's kind of revolutionising the UK market when it comes to fantasy football? Yeah, so I think it's obviously trying to tap into a lot of what we've seen with like FanDuel and DraftKings in that you can not only engage with the sport through like fantasy football. put a bit of money behind it, back yourself with wages and stakes and then be in sort of prize pools to win something at the end of the year maybe or like I said there's ones you can do on a weekend if you're looking for more sort of short term gameplay but it's definitely something that hasn't quite caught on as much in the UK market compared to in the US we've seen a few different sort of apps or different platforms to do something like this style couple of years ago called Ultimate Fan I think and it was kind of like a fantasy football game sort of merged with almost like a FIFA Ultimate Team style game where you would like get cards out of a pack and then you could get points from those players that you got in the pack through the game and you could sort of pay to have a membership to get better cards, better packs, stuff like that so there was a bit of a gambling element to that and now sort of in the past couple years we've seen this fan team dot com that you've mentioned and yeah so they're just basically trying to tap into that sort of regular weekly or almost I know it's obviously daily fantasy sports in the US but it's more sort of a weekly thing here with the Premier League and that sort of things that you can bet behind and I think a lot of it sort of shows that there's quite a lot of crossover in these audiences if you're looking at people who are sort of gambling with sports, like sports betting and people that are just playing on the casino as well and I think there's sort of quite an easy sort of pool of players there to appeal to with if you've got sort of many strings to your bow like DraftKings does with their online casino offering. There's clearly a lot of crossover between these players and sort of having these sort of gamified offerings on your platform like we can go on to talk about in a second, there's different bet and operators have put or launched new sort of fantasy style games that might be free to play or they might be paid for on their website. So yeah, it's definitely something interesting and something that you can imagine might sort of catch on a bit more as we're seeing fantasy on the whole getting a lot more popular each year. It wouldn't surprise me if we're seeing more people who do engage with these games and do also like a bet on the side, start to sort of merge those together with these offerings that we're seeing. I'm just looking at the website now actually, and they've announced there's a late registration period for game week two. I can get in there mate. Yeah. And he's saying that you start with 95% of the average points. So probably do better than I would have if I put a team in. Yeah. So I think it does just work like that. Right. You, you will pick your team on the, uh, I imagine you're giving a budget, a similar to fantasy football and then just however well you perform, you would get sort of prizes or being the chance to win prizes off of that performance. Yeah. I mean, we're no way kind of like promoting this specific platform, but it's just going off every example. It's 10 pound to enter and then that's the season long game where at the end of it, you'll have prizes, you'll even have the jackpot prize if you win, you come to up, you'll have prizes along the way. And then yeah, there's the individual weekend bets or even day bets where you, instead of putting like first goal score or you know, people to be booked and stuff like that, you know, and you build a bet or something like that. You instead... are able to kind of bet on the amount of bonus points that a player gets, you know, what goalkeeper is going to get the highest points throughout the whole weekend. And just again, if you bet on the weekend version, does your team come out on top? Are you at the highest of everyone playing that and you'll win a pot? And it's interesting because I do, the part of betting that I like is, isn't the accumulators where, you know, it's outright winners. It's that breakdown of bets per games, you know, if you can get your halftime boosts or your pregame boosts, you know, goals outside the area, you know, what defenders going to score a header or something like that. They're the breakdowns that I like. So, and this is what's really piqued my interest when it comes to fantasy betting. Ted, me and Danny have done a lot of talking here. Do you want to chime in on something? Yeah. I think some of the stuff that you've both mentioned is, yeah, you've mentioned a lot of really important key terms here. I think. I think one of the things that Danny said that I think is quite important to know is how he mentioned fantasy style sort of stuff. I think this is the challenge that operators are going to have, particularly in the UK, with sort of maybe if that's if the operators are going to want to do this, bridging the gap between the betting platforms and fantasy platforms is a fact that for one thing, unlike in the US, they haven't got this background in it. And second off, in the UK, we've already, as I said, have a long established betting market and now the fantasy is coming in the form mainly of the Premier League's own fantasy app, which we talked about how we've all got teams on, we're in a work league together. And it's pretty good, it's a solid offering. So I guess maybe the challenge operators might have is if they were to say, we wanna try and create our own fantasy thing, is to really market that to customers and say to them, customer might look at it and go, well, why would I bother using this bookmakers fantasy platform when I've already got the Premier League one that me and all my mates are in and me and all my colleagues are in. And then if I want to put a bet on, I'll just use the bookies app, you know, to, like you said, James, put a bet builder on bet on who's going to score a header in this game. I think the, and I think the way that they can bridge that gap is not, maybe not just directly launching their own fantasy platform, but by taking elements of it and taking inspiration from it. through like what Danny said of the gamification side of things, free to play games, stuff like that, which we're already seeing a lot more companies doing anyway over the past couple of years. Obviously we've written a lot about that on SPC News, Casino Beast and so on, a bit on Inside of Sport as well, about sort of the impact those are having. I think it might just be a bit of a challenge for operators to really make that jump from... from betting to fantasy sports and really merging the two, although we are seeing some doing it like this, sorry, you're gonna have to remind me the name of the platform again, it's just gone straight out of my head. What do you got? Yeah, fan team, yeah. It'll be interesting to see where that goes, how much more popular that'll get. Cause I mean, what is it? Is it a relative newcomer to the market? Best I've heard. Yeah. Well, I mean, you've always had like, betting.betterfair, they kind of offer like the tips and predictions for the fantasy football, which was kind of... The only way I really knew of Operator is kind of investing a lot into fantasy football. And this is going to be interesting, but I feel like we also kind of need to address the concerns, which it was highlighted last year. So it'd be good to see how that's evolved. And Ted, I'm going to come to you on this one just to kind of round off the podcast. But advertising in the Fantasy Premier League app itself was highlighted as a concern due to the age range I also mentioned earlier. But With that concern, which I'll let you address, there's also an opportunity as well for the Premier League when it comes to sponsorship because both of the apps, they're intertwined. Can you highlight the concern? Has that been addressed this season and how do you think operators can look to utilize the Premier League sponsorship and that app? Yeah, it's an interesting one. I've not personally, I've not heard that many... concerns raised about it this year. I don't know if really a lot of it has been overshadowed by a lot of the discussions around shirt sponsorships and things like that we've seen a lot of over the past couple of years and that we've discussed quite heavily on this podcast as well. Obviously, I guess the benefit with an app and with the sponsorship and advertising on the app is that with all the data that's available and with everyone having a different smartphone and having access to it, The app can tailor advertising, can't it? So they could just close it off and say, any betting advertising on these fantasy apps will be directed to 18s and above because it's an age restricted product. I guess that's one of the ways you can overcome that. But we are also seeing the Premier League and football in general, not necessarily put a bit more distance between itself and betting, but you know, certainly limit the. visibility of it a lot more as we've seen through a lot of these debates around the shirt sponsorship like what I mentioned and with the upcoming voluntary ban on front of shirt sponsors and kind of moving bookmakers to a position where they're not quite as visible anymore but still play a role. So I don't really, maybe that will reframe any conversation around advertising and betting engagement in fantasy football as well. I don't really see why the league would want to. increase Bettings engagement on that whilst they're also making efforts to reduce its engagement in terms of like the traditional sponsorship and commercial advertising side of things. Yeah, I can confirm I'm going through the app right now on my phone. Just to kind of look as a real time person and there's nothing, there's absolutely nothing in terms of gambling sponsorship. You've got your main licensees at the bottom which are obviously the official ones like Barclays, you and Guinness. Nye, Kobla, Oracle, all those stuff which I'll just put here because I'm not reading through them all. I think the only way you'd find gambling on the app is the fact that it includes the Premier League clubs shirts on there and they've obviously got a lot of gambling sponsors this year, what with the ban coming in the end of next season I believe. So I think that, yeah, there's, other than that, there's absolutely no way like... these sort of younger players would see on there. We're going to have to round it up. Ted, Danny, do you want to sign off with anything before we end the podcast? Yeah, I can just, I mean, obviously the fantasy football, particularly in the UK is growing and growing. It's getting much bigger. There's definitely a lot of inspiration bookmakers can take from it, I think, and I'm sure if they wanted to make a sort of launch into their own, launching their own fantasy sports sort of apps and products, they certainly could do, there's definitely the tech and the talent around to do that. I think the big challenge will be marketing that product and really sort of building up customer engagement with it when you've already got quite an extremely popular and extremely good Premier League fantasy product. Yeah, I think that's a really good point and the fact that there's obviously a lot of free fantasy offerings out there as well, like if there's operators that are going to be to make profit and revenue from these type of products then they're gonna obviously have to maybe make something a bit more appealing to their players but it's something that I think is working quite successfully for a couple of operators these sort of gamified sports related offerings like we've seen Sky better been running Super 6 for the past however many years now and that's always got more and more players each time so that's clearly a good way to sort of you know use these games, these fantasy products, having players engage with the sports, but then also maybe gaining some player conversion over to their actual sports betting products and offerings as well. That's an interesting point because I really want to talk about the free to play market a bit more in a bit more detail. So I'm glad we've at least touched on it before we ended the podcast, but apart from that, Danny, Ted, thank you for joining us. We'll continue this discussion in the office on a weekly basis, cause it's going to get feisty. I can guarantee it. Danny's already getting his smack talk. But right from that, this has been iGaming Daily. I've been James Ross. Thank you for listening.