DraftKings, the controversial but enormously popular online fantasy sports service, has announced it will launch in the UK on Friday.
The Boston-based company has paid out more than a billion dollars to its six million registered players, but it has also become embroiled in legal issues and concerns over whether it is actually a form of gambling -- and how it should be regulated.
The service allows players to take part in single day competitions, in which they pick teams across a specific sport, and face off based on various statistical measures. This formula has proven to work particularly well for DraftKings and its rival Edinburgh-based FanDuel with American football and the NFL, which is an inherently statistical sport and for which fantasy sports has been a huge growth business more generally.
But DraftKings already offers games for other sports including the NBA, NHL, Major League Soccer and golf, and is hoping fans will pick up the hunger for the past-time when it arrives for European soccer and the English Premier League.
Fantasy sports are also huge in the UK, but traditionally have involved months-long contests that pay out at the end of a season.
The service said it would partner with Arsenal, Liverpool and Watford football clubs to advertise the new service initially, before a potentially wider rollout in August before the start of the 2016/7 Premier League season. It said it would work to "bring players as close to the action as possible" and said that it would also explore ways to bring "some healthy competition between players in North America and the UK".
DraftKings said it had already opened an office in London, as part of the UK rollout.
While the site has proven to be enormously successful in the US, and is now valued at more than $1 billion, but worries that it could eventually be regulated out of existence in many US states where gambling is prohibited, including online poker but not currently fantasy sports, mean that it has been forced to diversify into other markets. In New York, the attorney general's office has pointed to the fact that between 2013 and 2014 the vast majority of players -- almost 90 percent -- lost money, even though advertising focuses on the few players than won large sums.
DraftKings has also been the focus of a recent controversy in which employees were accused of using data available at work to help win money on other sites.
In an interview with WIRED, DraftKings chief international officer Jeffrey Haas said that their product was mostly a game of skill, not chance, and should not be compared to straightforward betting -- even though the service has been granted a license to operate by the UK Gambling Commission. "You’re not betting on the individual results of a club, what you’re doing is you’re using your statistical skills to understand and analyse the likelihood of individual players’ across multiple teams and multiple games and their likelihood to succeed in those games," he said. "In order to create the best possible lineup in one of our contests. You’re not actually entering a contest entry based on the results of the games, but on the results of individual players during the games, and there are millions of hypothetical combinations of players you could put to create a successful lineup."
He added that though soccer is a lower-scoring game than most American sports, there were fundamental properties that have already made soccer-based DraftKings a success in the States. "It encourages players to follow along for the whole of the game," he said. Because even clean sheets at the end of the match are relevant. So even if the game is a 3-1 wash out, or 3-0 washout, you’re still interested all the way through the end because you have individual players in contest that have a clean sheet, and that impacts your raw score."
Additional reporting by Pauline Bock.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
