I spend four months every year, obsessing over a group of people playing a sport alien to most Indians. I feel rather possessive about these players, calling them “mine”, with no sense of irony, and follow every little news item about them. I am talking about fantasy football based on NFL, the primary professional league for American football. Or hand-egg as some people like to call it, in the interest of accuracy.
I have been playing fantasy sports for a long time now. I started with Super Selector, the ESPN Star Sports fantasy game for cricket, way back in 2001. Later on, I spent a good many years working on sports websites, and thus would play fantasy leagues across various sports, both for pleasure and as part of my job to better understand a user’s perspective and come up with features that make better sense.
However, it was always fantasy, as played for American professional sports, that I found most engaging, even though I was a much bigger fan of cricket and soccer. It boiled down to one thing. Fantasy football, baseball, etc. follow what is called the “draft” model of gameplay, where a player can belong to only one team in a given fantasy league of 6-16 teams. This in turn increases the amount of ‘ownership’ felt by someone playing the game. Most fantasy games for cricket, soccer, etc. follow the salary cap model, where the constraint of mutual exclusivity is gone, but all teams need to be under an upper player cost limit. What this means is that in a league of 8 teams, all 8 teams can potentially own Virat Kohli. And usually do.
A short while ago, one of the chaps in the group I play both fantasy football (NFL) and fantasy cricket with regularly, discovered that there was a startup, Cricbattle, offering the draft model of fantasy for cricket as well, and we decided that we would try that out for the upcoming Champions Trophy. A key ritual in such a fantasy game is draft day, which is when all those playing the game get to choose their team. And the experience of draft day for the Champions Trophy, was much like running a startup.
When you play fantasy football, you are choosing players from 32 teams, where each team has a roster of 53 athletes. And you are building your roster of 15 athletes from that. If your league has 8 teams, say, that is 120 from over 1,500. There are options and options and options for any strategy or tactic you may choose. And there are enough resources to dip into as well. It is quite like being a product manager at a large technology company. It is not easy, and you are not assured of success, just like in fantasy football. Mistakes are costly, and because there are so many options, it is quite easy to make wrong decisions.
However, when we drafted for Champions Trophy, where we were filling rosters of 12, we were doing so for a tournament that lasts a fortnight, and has just 8 teams whose squads are 15 apiece. 108 from 120! A lot of us ended up choosing players we do not like at all—players we were sure have very low probability of doing well, etc, only because there was no other option. This sort of a lack of resources to do all that you want to do is a situation you often encounter when running a startup.
But then, all of us who drafted, are still rather optimistic, competitive, and wanting to win while having fun at the same time. Much like running a startup, again.
In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace
