The Mo Salah effect: How Liverpool star has changed the face of Fantasy Premier League To Liverpool fans, Mo Salah means goals, showmanship and dazzling skill. To Martin Axford, who oversees the Fantasy Premier League, […]

To Liverpool fans, Mo Salah means goals, showmanship and dazzling skill. To Martin Axford, who oversees the Fantasy Premier League, Salah means something very different.

“I don’t think we’ve noticed anyone have as much impact in a single territory as Mo Salah,” he tells i. Last season, FPL had 201,000 players from Egypt; this season, they have 507,000. Fully 85 per cent of those playing in Egypt have Salah in their team. Thanks to Salah, more people in Egypt now play FPL than any other country in the world outside England.

The Salah effect is a window into the rise of FPL, the Premier League’s official fantasy game. When it was launched, before the 2002/03 season, FPL had 18,000 users, which quadrupled over the league’s first season – though it was still puny compared to the fantasy leagues run in newspapers. Now, FPL has 5.8 million players worldwide – a number that has more than doubled in the past five years, and has grown 28 per cent since the end of last year.

There are very typical traits of FPL players: the majority are males aged 18-34; indeed, 95 per cent of all players are male. Yet while the age and gender of players is relatively homogeneous, their geography reflects the Premier League’s global reach. Since 2014, the majority of players have been from outside England. As well as Egypt, the 10 most popular nations for FPL include Malaysia, Indonesia, India, the USA, Norway and Australia. Overall, 70 per cent of users are now from outside England.

Fantasy sports were born in the US in the 1950s – because of the simplicity of its scoring system, golf is believed to have been the first sport that had a fantasy game.

Their growth has been intertwined with the rise of the internet, and especially social media, which facilitates instant conversations between competing players while watching matches.

Billion-dollar industry

“We tend to be the second-screen experience,” says Jeffrey Haas, the chief international officer of Draft Kings, which has various leagues in the US and UK.

Thirty years ago, there were 500,000 people in the USA and Canada playing these games, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Fifteen years ago, there were 15 million. Today, there are 59 million; the industry is worth $7bn (£5bn) a year.

American fantasy leagues are helped by gambling being illegal in all bar four states. Yet the ban does not extend to fantasy leagues like Draft Kings – where people pay to enter, and either lose their stake or win cash prizes – and which effectively permit gambling by another name.

Fantasy sports in the UK are far less lucrative, largely because those who want to gamble on sports can do so legally. Yet UK fantasy leagues are also dramatically trending upwards. There are 8.5 million fantasy players in the UK, according to Haas. Remarkably, the majority of 20-something men in the UK play some form of fantasy sport.

Where US leads, UK follows

Leagues, including the FPL, are learning from America’s success. Indeed, partly with the US market in mind, the FPL draft – where players form a league and have a draft for every footballer, so that only one person in the league can sign Salah etc – was introduced this year, mimicking the drafts that are staples of US fantasy sports.

The FPL draft game already has 800,000 players, separate to the main FPL game. Next season, players will be able to make player trades between each other, and even complete mock drafts to prepare for draft day.

For players, it is more than just fun and games. “It’s very important to make sure it’s a credible game in everyone’s eyes,” Axford explains. “We review every decision very carefully – particularly around assists, we have very clear definitions that we have to protect to maintain the integrity.”

Marketing tool

For the Premier League, all of this is much more important than a mere gimmick. Unlike Draft Kings and other fantasy games, FPL, which is free to enter, does not make money. Instead, it is a brilliant marketing tool for the league.

“The indications are that it has been instrumental in driving significant interest in the Premier League,” says Axford, who is also the league’s head of digital.

“That’s ultimately what the Premier League gets out of it – we’re looking to increase exposure to our players.”

This is the aim that underpins the FPL: to lead fans to follow the Premier League itself more fervently. “It’s about engagement. It’s really important that we provide a platform that allows people an entry point to enjoy the Premier League through a fantasy lens,” Axford explains. “Matches that don’t feature the club they support suddenly take on a new significance because they have players playing for those clubs in their fantasy teams.”

By making more matches relevant for more people, “fantasy has generated more interest in live matches”. Fantasy players are more likely to either watch games or follow them online.

‘A source of great pain’

“On a weekend it can make or break some people’s days,” adds Axford. “We get people sharing information about points they have left on the bench… That can be a source of great pain.”

As fantasy games become increasingly immersive, they also bring risks: the average player on Draft Kings spends 4.8 hours a month, across the mobile app and website, and US fantasy players have suffered from addiction and anxiety.

The ascent of fantasy games reflects, and is accelerating, the change in how we view professional sport. Increasingly, sport is seen less through the prism of traditional clubs, and more through that of individual celebrity players; for example Cristiano Ronaldo has more Twitter followers than Real Madrid and Barcelona combined.

The inexorable rise of fantasy sports is the perfect emblem for this new age, in which the thorny issue of who actually wins and loses a match is increasingly marginalised by all the surrounding pizzazz.

More from Tim Wigmore: