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A few hours separate us from the start of the funniest league in the world, that’s how its fans describe it, and that’s how it is described in the media, the Premier League returns to us with a new season.
The stars of the English Premier League are not only the pull factor, there is also another attraction for the fans, be it in the world or in the Arab world.
The game of the “Fantasy Premier League”, a great story of wins and losses, joy with many points and regret for bad decisions, many decisions that you made and stressed yourself and others spellbound not to take or blame yourself.
That game that worries the masses with each release of the new season, how did it come about? Did you know that this game started in the 1960s?
Let’s start our journey together through this report, on the history of the fantasy football game, how it started, developed and became what it is.
History has not recorded a specific date for the first time when what is known among the masses as “fantasy” was played, but during 1963, on one of the exhausting nights of work with a little alcohol, the first game was born. of “Fantasy” in a hotel in New York City.
Will Winckenbach, who owns part of the Oklan Riders football team, is with Bill Tonnell, the director of public relations, and Scottie Stirling, a news reporter, who decided to create a fantasy league.
Back then that league was called the GOPPPL or Bigskin Predictions Auckland Grand League, so the Fantasy game started for the first time.
But that game was not for the public, rather it was private for all members of the team. In 1969, World War II hero Andy Musalemas decided to publish the game to the public and make it available to all visitors to his owned restaurant and bar.
Andy became the first man to publish the “Fantasy” game to the public, but this decision cost him a lot, as he was expelled from the GOPPPL League for publishing the game to the public after it was private.
What you don’t know is that the first Fantasy game had most of the current rules and current game format, head-to-head matches, a series of substitutions, leagues between players, and end dates for amendments on Friday at noon.
What Musicalemas did attracted a lot of people, and the game spread among the public, and in 1974 there were more than 200 players playing, and in the 1980s there were full female versions.
During the 1980s, the reputation of the game flourished a lot, there were no social networking sites but everyone was talking about it, especially since it was very entertaining and caused accurate tracking of matches.
At the end of the eighties a magazine was published that contained a set of rules of the game “Fantasy” and it spread like wildfire, at that time, the game reached one million players.
The game has become easier to play than in the past. There is an opportunity to track the leagues, then there have been sales for the game itself. Then the game began to become over time in the nineties in a digital version little by little.
Welcome to the game in Europe
The great fame of the game in the United States of America, made it come to Europe, Ricardo Albini, the owner of the first Italian magazine dedicated to video games, developed the Fantasy game for the Italian League in 1990.
“Gaining a clear understanding of the proposition, experience, communication and insight to help build and realize the concept of the game” – Andy Weinstein Founder of Fantasy Premier League Game.
In 1991, Andy Weinstein was so impressed with the popularity of the game in America that he decided to start a new company … Fantasy League Limited.
“Team changes change every Friday at noon,” Andy Weinstein tells the Financial Times, laughing.
He continued: “All the reporters used to provide us with all the details of the performance and the positions. We were doing it all Sunday night. My biological clock was adjusting according to when the press needed papers. Every two hours I would get up and put more. papers before coming and going to the post office. “
“A friend of mine was right when he told me the idea. I thought about it and started looking up game statistics, preparing graphics and computer programming based on my own data,” he said.
My first league in the first year in England had 70 leagues participating, but the big bang was when the newspapers and the media decided to pay attention to the matter.
During the year 1994, Fantasy Football had begun to gain fame in England, due to a program of the same name, presented by comedians David Baddell and Frank Skinner, at which point the situation changed and it became an undoubtedly popular game.
Earnings in the first year were £ 10-15,000, but that program more than doubled the earnings.
“We went from 700 teams to 3,000,” Weinstein said.
The British newspaper “Telegraph” decided to launch its own version with a copy of Weinstein before the start of the 1993-1994 season, with great interest in the game, for example the presence of a special subscription by telephone or through post offices in pre-Internet times, with a deadline for changes and modifications in the Friday era.
In the 1994-1995 season, a 12-year-old boy named Jonathan Rodgers won the Telegraph tournament. It was from Blackburn. At the time, he beat 341,866 people, and the prize was a two-week vacation anywhere in the world to watch a game of his choice.
Welcome to internet services
Let’s go back to our trip to the United States of America again, when CBS introduced the first online version in 1997, and then the popular “Yahoo” site and its free version in 1999.
In this period in Britain, the game “Fantasy” was very popular at this time, as were the “Awards Great Britain” of 1997, the Spice Girls singing with the British flag, the period of Prime Minister Tony Blair and other things. famous of that time.
Fantasy League.com, an online game was introduced in 2000-01, and several other websites featuring the game were launched, but the first online community for the game was a popular forum in Britain for “Fantasy and Interactive Sports Online “, or FISO.
Premier Win offered £ 1 million in cash to the prize winner in 2001 but was closed due to insufficient funds.
What was the game like at the time and how did it develop?
An important question on our minds, especially since 20 years have passed. It was very simple, players create leagues and usually leagues are made up of 5-10 people and they choose an imaginary team. The performance of the team depends on the level of the real players each week, goal points and goal scores, attempts, etc.
Over the years, the rules of the game have changed a bit and have evolved to keep pace with the requirements of the time and also to contain the stars that graced the Premier League skies.
The first official version of the Fantasy Premier League game was presented in the 2002-2003 season, the site was very simple, first a section that asked you to play for free and choose your team, and the “Analyst” section that helps you with your choices later. of the preparatory round, keeping track of the players and choosing the best levels. “She was using the image of Arsenal’s Thierry Henry at the time.”
This is how the points were calculated at that time:
Analyst nominations and statistics:
Here is a list of some of the fees and the exchange method:
After that, you will be notified of the amendment end dates for each round from the first to the second and then the rest of the rounds, and the time is for Great Britain, taking into account that the difference is taken into account hours outside of it.
Of course it comes with the matches, rounds and results.
We won’t talk for long, check out this wonderful video that shows the development of the official Fantasy Premier League game website from 2002 to 2015, when the video was released.
“They have been great years,” Weinstein said. “At least we made a profit between 1998 and 2012.”
He continued: “I don’t see any company in America or Britain that has done the job in an excellent way. In the end, the media owners own the game and they don’t earn much now, unlike in the past.”
“I was on what could be described as a personal journey, and I was optimistic about it, looking back when I started the game, it was about passion and pleasure in doing everything.”
He added: “It motivated me to do something new, that is, what we have done compared to others on the field. We tried to do it in a new and attractive way, and we were very successful.”
“It’s a dice game, and I came out with some wins and losses, but in the end I kept my jersey.”
The Internet helped the game to acquire more players each season, and it also reached the world away from the Internet with the other using it in a very attractive way, which made it enjoyable and at the same time useful to follow the matches, players, statistics and news. from the competition.
Sources:
AllaboutFPl
FOOT
fpldiscovery
Sports Casting
