India has always been a sports-loving nation. The craziness over cricket in India is unmatchable. Recently in the T20 World Cup 2021, India vs Pakistan match broke all the previous viewership records. Other than Cricket, Football has also been very popular. The football clubs like East Bengal, Mohun Bagan have a great history and a great fan base. For any sport to thrive, the role of sports fans is extremely important.
In the quest of making live sports events more fan engaging, online fantasy sports turned out to be a great tool in the last few years. There are many platforms that came across in this tenure for online fantasy cricket and football. The craze for fantasy games is not going to slow down. Fantasy platforms have a good future ahead as games other than cricket are also gaining support from users and the growth opportunities are excellent.
To give a brief about Online Fantasy Sports, It is a form of online gaming which is dependent on real sporting events. A player has to choose their team from real-life teams and players based on their existing understanding of the rules of the game and prior player performances. Currently, a handful of models are already operating in this space with different sets of algorithms. Players score the points on the chosen team according to the performance of players in the match and winners are decided based on that.
Today Online Fantasy Sports has become an integral major sporting event in India at least for Cricket. Online Fantasy Cricket has in fact catapulted many cricket fans and enthusiasts to utilise their understanding of the game and player performances and even enhance them, as they engage with more sports and leagues. The sector has created a community that is engaging with sports and willing to upskill their understanding of various sports.
Football and Kabbadi are also following the trends of cricket and gained good traction in terms of numbers.
To deep dive into the numbers, The market has witnessed a 700% increase in the past decade in the number of fantasy sports operators and a 2,500% spike in the number of fantasy sports users.
Source: IBEF
India’s digital environment and internet penetration is also one of the biggest reasons that the space has witnessed such a drastic change.
One of the other major reasons for the increase of Fantasy sports in India is that sports betting in the country is illegal and other forms of gambling are also prohibited. Also, some Indian courts have already announced that Fantasy sports are considered as skilled games and anyone can participate. As the market is expanding more and more fantasy sports platforms have started operating and this indeed a very good sign for fan engagement and innovation across it.
Currently, the fantasy sports industry is at a nascent stage, with numerous start-ups competing to attract the country’s 800 million sports viewers. This trend is likely to persist as these companies thrust into various sports leagues to attract advertisers, customers and investors. Apart from Indians’ unending love for sports, especially cricket, low-cost data plans and high penetration of mobile phones have made these start-ups a lucrative bet for investors. Over the past five years, investors have pumped US$ ~112 million into India’s sports fantasy platforms.
According to a forecast present of statstica , the value of the online fantasy sports market across India in Fiscal Year 2021 is around 24 billion rupees and it is expected to become 54 billion rupees by 2025.
Fantasy Sports, Being one of the fastest growing markets in India the main credit goes to the incredible popularity of Cricket in India. Fantasy cricket is leading the way and eager to capitalize on them. 100 million user mark is already reached by hundreds of millions are out there and waiting to join the trend.
