The world’s top soccer leagues kicked off their 2022/23 seasons earlier this month, so the fantasy football craze is once again ramping up all over the planet. Drafting a team and ranking against others based on how its players perform in real-world fixtures is a uniquely entertaining experience; one that is particularly popular in this late-summer period while the next iterations of the most popular soccer games are still in development. Right now, there’s still five weeks until FIFA 23 hits the market, while Football Manager 2023 hasn’t even been officially announced yet.
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One particularly enthusiastic fantasy football league from the U.S. decided to organize a wrestling battle royal to determine this year’s player draft order. Not in the sense that its dozen players dished it out in the ring, but by delegating the dishing to a professional wrestling organization, Mass Anarchy Wrestling based out of Rhode Island. The players were randomly paired with wrestlers, who then proceeded to fight for their drafting interests till the last man. It’s debatable whether the end result of this convoluted system was fair, but it was certainly highly entertaining for fans of fantasy football, WWE, and beyond. A video summary of the event has been shared on TikTok earlier this week and can be seen below.
The mainstream gaming industry still hasn’t capitalized on the exploding popularity of fantasy football. Arguably the highest-profile attempt at doing so was announced early last year, when industry giant Ubisoft revealed that it’s working on a blockchain-based fantasy football game called One Shot League. But there’s been no word from that project ever since, possibly due to the strong public backlash against NFTs—which are inherently a blockchain technology—that Ubisoft has been seeing. It’s hence possible that the final product will be significantly different to the original vision.
On the other hand, there might not be much overlap between the target audience of One Shot League and the demographic responsible for Ubisoft’s recent Project Q and NFT controversy. And even without massive investments, the fantasy football niche is already heavily decentralized - not in terms of backend technologies but platform competition and leagues. The latter of which vary from ultra-casual to those that finance professional wrestling battle royals to determine their player draft orders.
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