🏈 Fantasy football’s American ritual returns — while the game’s biggest market

The American fantasy football season began this week the way it always does: with rankings, breakout picks and arguments. ESPN’s latest instalment names six players its analysts think are being undervalued — the kind of pre-season ritual that has helped build a game with more than 14 million players on that platform alone.

But the centre of gravity in fantasy sports no longer sits in the United States, and the more consequential story this year is happening seven thousand miles away.

India is the largest fantasy sports market in the world by participation, built almost entirely on cricket rather than American football. Dream11, its dominant platform, counts somewhere between 200 and 250 million registered users depending on whose estimate you use — an order of magnitude beyond ESPN’s fantasy audience or the 11 million who play Fantasy Premier League.

That scale was assembled on paid contests. Then India’s parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, outlawing real-money online games, and the industry’s revenue model disappeared almost overnight. Dream11 and its competitors suspended paid contests and pivoted to free-to-play formats, replacing entry fees with advertising and sponsorship.

The result is two versions of the same game moving in opposite directions. American fantasy football remains a mature, commercially stable product where the argument is about which running back to draft. South Asian fantasy cricket has vastly more players and, for now, a far less certain way of making money from them.

For readers in Bangladesh and across the region, that divergence is the part worth watching. Cricket is the fastest-growing category in fantasy sports globally, and India’s regulatory decision is the template neighbouring governments will look at first when they write their own rules.

Sources: ESPN · Mordor Intelligence · Precedence Research · Straits Research · Grand View Research