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It's time fantasy football started paying out

(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
Roar Guru
14th February, 2018
59

Fantasy football – or, in our world, SuperCoach NRL – has morphed to focus on each and every game. It is an unexpected goldmine for rugby league that has attracted and developed a new breed of follower.

The biggest fantasy league is SuperCoach (SC), and last season over 130,000 fans signed up to play.

Kids, teenagers, mums, dads and even their parents are forced to watch every match to see how the players in the team they are ‘coaching’ are earning points.

Surely there could be no more deserving winner than 2017 SuperCoach champion Sam Rohlf, who was diagnosed with bowel cancer three years ago and managed his team from three different hospitals. He took home a $50,000 prize.

This is an amazing story, and it’s staggering how Sam was able to focus for 26 weeks, making some brilliant close calls. No doubt the excitement of SC and having to pull out all stops to ward of thousands of other players helped him get through such a challenging time in his life.

The prize may seem plentiful, and it was able to fund a trip to New York for Sam, his wife and three kids, but the SuperCoach revenue numbers are huge and Sam’s cheque should have been multiplied by 10 or even 20.

(Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

You don’t have to be a genius to work out the huge amount of money that SC creates for its owners.

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The NRL needs to be attacking the rank and file fans and the battlers. SC gives them a reason to watch every match instead of just their favourite team, but to be competitive in SC you must be able to watch every game and have ready access to social media and the extra stats and analysis tools. Many fans simply cannot afford Foxtel or a News Corp subscription to keep up to date with late changes.

The NRL have NRL Fantasy. Yes, they are both fun and attract an audience, but the SuperCoach players who can afford the gold stats packages and Foxtel are like the privileged NRL teams who have third-party agreements over the poorer or more remote clubs.

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The huge array of digital adverts that we are forced to endure every time we log in to SC surely would be sufficient to fund exposure to statistical figures for every fan. Somehow it seems counterproductive not to encourage and enhance interest by giving the fans more information.

Every fan log-in creates revenue, and for 130,000-plus fans just to buy the paper each day during the season adds up to a big payday for the NRL and News Corp, and if you add the other variables, like stats packages, then you really do need a maths degree to work out the profits.

It is difficult to know how many fans play fantasy football for fun or whether they just want to win first prize regardless of the amount, but why do you think corporate bookie Matthew Tripp offered $1 million in his tipping competition in 2011? The 100,000 members who played more than covered the prize.

The NRL and News Corp are at risk of losing their monopoly if they continue to squeeze the lemon too hard and offer embarrassingly low prize money.

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