The women’s soccer league trying to fix fantasy sports | The Verge

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The women’s soccer league trying to fix fantasy sports

The Women’s Super League’s first official fantasy app is rethinking the game from the ground up.

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The WSL’s first official fantasy game is putting player photos front and center, which is less common than you might expect.

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Most fantasy sports leagues suffer the same problem: retention. Leagues play out over months-long seasons, require regular attention, and can punish players severely for missing even a single week. I’ve started Fantasy Premier League (FPL) multiple times, but never finished a season.

That’s a problem for any fantasy league, but especially so for a new game in a growing sport, hoping to attract new fans who might grow along with it. And so when Manchester United take on London City Lionesses on the opening day of the Women’s Super League (WSL) season next month, fans will have a chance to compete in a fantasy league that’s a little different, with six parts to the season, two leagues in one, and an Instagram-influenced design.

I got to play an early version of the game last week, which launches today online or inside the WSL app. The basics are still there. Users spend a fixed pool of money on a team of players drawn from across the league, with a maximum of three players from any individual club. Players score points based on their performances in real matches, with the option to substitute players or transfer them in or out of the team as the season progresses. The WSL will run its own league table, with prizes for the top spots, but fans can create private leagues too.

The most obvious change from existing fantasy games is given away by the name: Barclays WSL and WSL2 Football Fantasy. The WSL’s 14 teams will be joined by the 12 in WSL 2, England’s second division. Players will be interspersed, and users free to build a squad drawn entirely from either league or a mix of both.

The WSL merged its two leagues to avoid winning teams becoming samey. Although it’s expanding to 14 teams this season, until now the WSL has only included 12, compared to 20 in the men’s Premier League. And only three or four of those — Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, and at times Manchester United — ever truly have a shot at the title. The result was that in Aerial Fantasy — an unofficial league that’s closing to make way for the official game — almost every successful team was built around the same handful of players. By January “the game just lost momentum,” says Joey Davidson, the WSL’s head of digital products, “because so many of the squads in the leader board were just so similar.”

Adding a second league doesn’t just add more teams; it adds more competitive teams, with players at top WSL 2 clubs likely to be valuable point-scorers. Players from WSL 2 will tend to be cheaper in-game, but that’s not written in stone: the developers say that in practice no WSL 2 players prove quite as dominant in their league as top WSL footballers like Manchester City’s Bunny Shaw do in theirs, but if one did then the fantasy game’s dynamic pricing could drive their value up.

Players from across the two WSL divisions can compete against each other in a single fantasy league.

Just as significant is the shift to break the season up. From the outset, the WSL and developer SI wanted to fix the player retention problem. Leagues play out over entire seasons — nine months in the case of the WSL — and to have any chance of being competitive a user has to pay attention to almost every single game week. Miss one, and you’re screwed. Things are worse for late arrivals, who are either cut off from joining a league after it’s started, or can join but have no real chance of victory.

While there will still be a season-long league table, WSL fantasy will also break it up into six shorter “legs,” each including three to six matchweeks. Timed around the natural breaks in the soccer calendar, dictated by international fixtures and the pause for Christmas, each leg will have its own mini table, including prizes for the winners. You’ll need to be devoted if you hope to win the whole season, but shorter bursts of commitment could bring their own reward. Fans who find fantasy mid-season, or those who drop in and out, can still hope to perform well in a leg or two.

Existing fantasy soccer fans are used to putting up with these headaches, but the WSL isn’t only trying to appeal to them. The popularity of women’s soccer grew substantially in England a few years ago, sparked by the national team winning the Euros in 2022. That momentum hasn’t entirely been maintained since, with fluctuating match day attendance figures propped up by big numbers at a single club, Arsenal, though there’s reason to hope this year could mark the next push in popularity. The league expanding means more teams and more games; there’s another World Cup due next summer; and perhaps most importantly, Ted Lasso has returned with a new focus on the women’s game. Davidson calls it “perfect timing.”

Some of these changes to the established fantasy format are ambitious, and the WSL knows it. A running theme of my press briefing was that everything will be up for assessment as this first season goes on, from the pricing of WSL 2 players to the type of content created inside the app. Davidson admits he has “absolutely no idea” how popular to expect the fantasy league to become, but by breaking the season up into legs hopes that it could end with more players than it begins — a tall ask for any other fantasy league.

But you can’t fault the effort to try, nor the decision from day one that the WSL’s fantasy game needed to be more than a mere clone of the men’s equivalent. This is its own league, with its own fans and its own foibles. If it’s going to grow, it has to do it its own way.

“If we just replicate what already exists, we know that there is a ceiling to how far it can go,” Davidson says. “And we don’t want to give ourselves a ceiling.”

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