The year was 1963 when a couple of hardcore sports enthusiasts came up with a simple way to engage fans much more in the sport they loved. The first ever recorded game of Fantasy Football was played in August 1963 between a very private group of football fanatics based out of Oakland, CA.

1979 was the year when the phenomenon called Fantasy Football went out of Oakland and made a national highlight with inauguration of one of the oldest running fantasy leagues in the world – 'G' National Football League or GFL.  The fantasy users would mail their weekly rosters and team lineups to league owners and commissioners and used their daily newspapers to calculate scores and predict winners.

Fantasy Football Meets the World Wide Web

The introduction of web in 1997 caused a spur in businesses world-wide and fantasy football was not one to sit out.  The popularity of Fantasy Football grew ten folds with the introduction of the Internet. Major media houses and sports providers suddenly capitalized on this growing trend with CBS being the first major player to introduce beta version of the first publicly available free fantasy football website.  Within three years, all major sports media websites launched competing fantasy football hosting websites. The NFL released their own official game in 2010, NFL.com Fantasy Football, further driving industry growth. Fantasy football is now the single most important marketing tool for the NFL. Today it is estimated over 30 million people compete in public and private leagues online.

The Growing Trends

As with everything in nature, even the simple idea of Fantasy Football has evolved and it keeps evolving. Gone are the days of long painful season drafts and waiting for 16 – 17 weeks before a winner is declared with strict lineup structures and scoring systems, the game has evolved enough to accommodate new thinking, new ideas for new age players.

Let's cast an eye on this very evolution in the game –

• No longer wait for months to get paid, you can do that on daily basis. With Daily Deal games you get paid instantly and get more involved in the sport without spending too much time on drafting a team for an entire season, just choose from the very best available.

• Fantasy football of 2013 allows its users to pick and choose from various gaming types and trends. No more season long games, you can test your skills against the very best with extreme survivor tournaments.

• For season long games, you have various new draft methods apart from the traditional draft used by NFL. Now you can get the players you want and strategize based on your expertise with features like Player Auction and Tag Drafts.

• You have survivor and game tournaments for extreme fans where one defeat kicks you out! Taking the art of Fantasy Football to extreme. With greater rewards and greater rush.

• Fantasy Football of 2013 allows you to pick and choose your lineup based on your strengths; you have flexible lineups based on your strategies giving the sport a unique perspective and feel. Pick and choose not only your line up by the lineup structure without having to worry about trading or dropping players.

• Fantasy Leagues of today offer better user interface which help engage a user more and thus result in better user satisfaction. Improved and interactive UI allows users to be more involved by providing a personalized touch.

Vinfotech and Fantasy Football

As a premium web development company full of sports lovers and fanatics, we eventually branched out in the addictive world of Fantasy Sports with our very own fantasy league development and fantasy league design solutions. We started our journey in 2011-12 with a simple question - what can we do to improve fantasy football experience? The result was "DumpsterFire (www.dumpsterfire.com); an edgier, fun and innovative fantasy football solution for the Facebook generation - a site that offered the best of both worlds, an innovative fantasy football game clubbed with best of social networking features for users of all types. The rush we got from developing DF soon changed the course of our Sports Offerings and we spent considerable amount of time to further study the sweet science of Fantasy Football. We studied all the latest trends, latest features and championed ourselves as Fantasy solution providers. This very year, we successfully launched not 1 or 2 but 3 state of the art and unique fantasy football solutions

• MyFanFlash
• OverUnderSports
• LeaguePlus

These three unique solutions along with DumpsterFire (watch the video here) helped us offer all possible variation of Fantasy Football to the users. At Vinfotech we took our love for the game to the next level by offering some of the most unique games to millions of Sports fanatics just like us.

REFERENCES: www.fanduel.com, www.draftkings.com