Can Horse Racing Capitalize on the Success of Daily Fantasy Sports?
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Every Sunday as you sit down to catch a glimpse of your favorite NFL team, you cannot help but to be inundated with information concerning fantasy leagues and the various fantasy football contest sites. The proliferation of these sites have led to both a renewed and increased interest by fans in the major sports leagues of football, baseball, hockey and basketball. One company found that individuals playing in a particular daily sports fantasy contest increased their consumption of sports content by 40%.
These numbers are certainly hard to ignore as the delivery of sports content is a multi-billion business. Maintaining your engagement with a sport as a fan is not limited however to the four major sports. Horse racing stands to benefit from increased fan interest through the success of daily fantasy sports. Understanding the ways in which certain betting games, such as daily racing contests, drive your interest in a sport serves as important information for promoters and organizers of horse racing in order to create new fans and a lasting interest.
Fantasy Sports and the Growth in Fan Interest
Here are some more numbers regarding the success of daily fantasy sports contests in spurring interest in sports content. An ESPN survey showed that 38% of the U.S. population (118 million adults) admitted to sports betting in 2008. Fantasy sports users grew 25% since 2011 while the Fantasy Sports Trade Association reported a whopping 51.8 million fantasy players in both the U.S. and Canada in 2015.
These numbers appear to coincide with the explosion in interest in real-time games by daily fantasy sports participants. In 2010, according to the Hollywood Reporter, 26 football contests that season averaged a little over 20 million and another 15 games had in excess of 25 million viewers. These numbers are a boon for other sports, such as horse racing, who also stand to benefit from the marriage of casual fantasy players to real-time enthusiasts.
How Horse Racing Benefits from the Success of Daily Fantasy Sports
Horse racing is said to have been on the forefront of the daily fantasy sports experience long before it became popularized by the major sports. Called handicapping contests, these games came into existence as far back as the early 2000s. The creation of the Daily Racing Form/NTRA National Handicapping Championship stemmed the loss in interest in horse racing as the growth of internet casinos and other forms of online gambling began to take hold.
Handicapping contests are merely the tip of the iceberg as horse racing seeks to gain its share of the fantasy to real world pie. The renewed popularity in the Sport of Kings fueled by the first Triple Crown winner in American Pharaoh since 1978 means the original daily fantasy sports game (handicapping contests) can become the bridge that brings back a strong interest in the horse racing by allowing fans a way to be very much interested in outcomes as they are in football and other sports.
