Fantasy Sports
A restaurant lunch in 1980 created imaginary baseball teams. Now a $20 billion industry.
A magazine editor invited friends to a Manhattan French restaurant in 1980. They drafted major league baseball players onto imaginary teams and scored each other on real statistics through the season. Forty years later, that lunch had built a global industry generating over $20 billion in annual revenue. Fantasy Sports spent its first three decades as a hobby. Friends ran leagues out of spreadsheets, paid an entry fee, and split the pot at year end. The commercial breakthrough arrived when DraftKings launched in 2012, two years after FanDuel opened in 2009. Both offered daily fantasy sports, where users drafted a new lineup each game day and won prize money the same evening. Daily fantasy was classified as a game of skill rather than gambling under federal law, which let the two companies operate nationally while sports books remained illegal in 49 states.
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