Leveraging fantasy football in the NFL plans for asian markets

It is no secret that the NFL is looking to expand their market beyond the United States. The Buffalo Bills occasionally play in nearby Canada and the now there is the annual game in London to keep the NFL relevant in Europe. One of the still untapped market is Asia.

In an interview with Kathryn Cardena at the Asia Blog, Vishal Singh, NFL Vice President of Digital Media Business Development discusses the NFL's interest in Asia as well as using fantasy football to attract fans.

The NFL's fantasy product is continuing to gain market share ever since its launch 4 years ago. They compete and also cooperate with other game providers such as Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS Sports and Fox Sports in the the traditional fantasy football season leagues. At this point, the NFL does not offer any daily games.

Singh highlights that an important initiative and decision the NFL made was to not outsource NFL.com. By doing so, it provided the NFL better opportunities for fantasy football to be able to scale to that business and the demand for that product.

However, there are challenges with the Asia market and Singh mentioned time zones and fan education were two important factors. Mobility and smartphones were identified as key technologies in order to bridge these challenges in the Asia market.

FTSB says: The partnership that the NFL has with the other game providers is interesting. The NFL already gets a "halo effect" from the Yahoo! and ESPN when they are successful in fantasy football. So one could make the business case that the NFL.com fantasy game is unnecessary.

NFL.com being operated by the NFL is important to the success of fantasy football at NFL.com. When you look at what the NBA has done, they currently are partnering with Yahoo to provide the fantasy experience. By doing so, the NBA could be placing artificial barriers on being able to grow its fantasy basketball user base and thus grow its basketball user base.

Control is important to all major sports in how the fantasy sports grow. Fantasy sports contributes to the branding of the sports. When the branding  of the fantasy game contradicts that of the real sport, than there could be an issue. Case in point, if all the fantasy football game providers start promoting fee incentive games or other gambling type qualities in their games, that affects the image of NFL. Thus it was a wise decision for the NFL.com to have its own game platform to be able to set the direction and brand of its product.