Why Do We Keep Playing Fantasy Football?

I've been in the same fantasy football league for 12 years.

Basically the same people. Same hometown. My little brother is in it. Some of these guys, I honestly only see once a year now.

And yet, every year, everybody comes back.

That got me thinking: why do we keep playing fantasy football?

There are plenty of obvious answers. We like football. We like stats. We like winning. There's money involved. There's trash talk, ridiculous last-place punishments, draft-night food, and the satisfaction of watching some random receiver score a touchdown because he happens to be on your team.

But I wanted to know if there was something deeper behind why fantasy football is so popular and why leagues can keep people coming back year after year.

So I looked into fantasy football data, psychology research, competition, social connection, loss aversion, and one other fantasy player's experience.

The short answer: fantasy football makes football more personal, gives us something to compete over, and gives us a recurring reason to stay connected. The research doesn't reduce the game to one explanation, but those three ideas kept showing up again and again.

Why Fantasy Football Feels Personal

One of the weirdest things about fantasy football is how quickly it can make a completely meaningless NFL game feel important.

Normally, I probably don't care about a random game between two teams I don't follow.

Put one of my fantasy players in that game?

Now I'm sitting there thinking, Come on. I need six more points.

That change from watching to participating seems to be a big part of the appeal.

According to the MRI-Simmons July 2023 Sports Fan Study, 38% of fantasy football participants said fantasy makes the game or season more exciting, while 25% said it makes them feel more involved with the game and its athletes. The same research found that 85% said fantasy sports help them learn more about the game.

That makes sense to me.

Once you start playing fantasy football, you suddenly care about targets, snap percentages, injuries, depth charts, backups, and players you probably never would have thought about otherwise.

You learn football because knowing more can actually help you.

And over the course of a season, those players start to become your guys.

I asked another fantasy player about this while researching the video, and his explanation was incredibly simple:

When the player does well, you do well.

You might spend 15 or 16 weeks watching the same player every Sunday. Eventually, you start rooting for him even if you never cared about his actual NFL team.

Fantasy football takes something you were watching and gives you a stake in what happens.

It turns us from spectators into participants.

Not literally. We're still sitting on the couch.

But suddenly what happens on the field has a consequence for you.

And that explains a lot about why fantasy makes football more interesting.

It still doesn't explain why beating your friends feels so good.

Why Fantasy Football Is So Competitive

Winning against a random person online is fine.

Beating the friend who has been talking about how good his team is for the last three months?

Way better.

MRI-Simmons found that 37% of fantasy football participants said they love the competition involved. Interestingly, only 30% said they play for the money.

That distinction matters.

Money can make fantasy football more interesting, but it doesn't explain the whole thing.

There's something different about competing against people you actually know.

A 2023 review by Avishalom Tor and Stephen M. Garcia, The neuroscience of social comparison and competition, explains that social comparison gives people information about their relative position, abilities, and outcomes. Competition gives us a very obvious scoreboard for making those comparisons.

Fantasy football basically gives us a new scoreboard every week.

Your team against mine.

My draft against yours.

The trade I made that you said was terrible.

The player you passed on who suddenly has 30 points.

There's always something to compare.

And then fantasy leagues found an even better way to make people care:

punishments.

Last-place punishments are ridiculous when you think about them. A team could be completely eliminated from championship contention and still be fighting for its life late in the season because nobody wants to finish last.

Behavioral economics gives us an interesting way to think about that.

A 2024 meta-analysis in the Journal of Economic Literature examined 607 empirical estimates of loss aversion from 150 articles. In the authors' preferred model, the mean estimated loss-aversion coefficient was 1.955, with a 95% probability interval of 1.820 to 2.102. You can read the American Economic Association paper here.

That does not mean losing a fantasy matchup universally hurts exactly twice as much as winning one feels good. The number comes from a specific loss-aversion framework across many studies.

But the broader idea is useful: avoiding a negative outcome can carry a lot of psychological weight.

Your team might be 3-9.

The championship dream might be gone.

But if finishing last means doing something embarrassing in front of your friends, suddenly the rest of the season still matters.

Competition helps explain why we care about winning.

But even that didn't fully explain something about my own league.

Twelve years.

That's a long time to keep playing the same game with practically the same people.

And that's where I found what I think is the most interesting part of fantasy football.

How Fantasy Football Keeps Friends Connected

When our league started, we were kids.

We'd show up wearing jerseys of our favorite players. I had a LeSean McCoy jersey.

Before the draft, we'd play tackle football in the street. Then we'd go inside, draft teams even though most of us barely knew what we were doing, take a break, play more football, eat pizza, and hang out.

Our parents were there.

It was just something we did.

Then everyone got older.

School changed. College happened. People got jobs. Everyone got busier.

There are people in that league who I barely see throughout the rest of the year now.

But everybody still comes back for the draft.

And somehow, when we're all together again, it doesn't really feel like we haven't seen each other.

It just feels normal.

That personal experience lined up surprisingly well with the data.

In 2024, Yahoo Sports and DKC Analytics surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults interested in playing fantasy football. Among respondents who compete against friends and acquaintances, 83% said fantasy football helps them keep in touch with friends they wouldn't otherwise see, and more than 50% said that without fantasy football they probably would not remain friends with some people in their league. Yahoo also reported that 81% said fantasy football helps them maintain friendships with people who are different from them. The Yahoo survey methodology reports a 3.1% margin of error at 95% confidence.

When I read that, I immediately thought:

That's basically my league.

Fantasy football gives people a recurring reason to talk.

There's the draft.

Then the first week.

Then somebody proposes a terrible trade.

Then somebody loses by half a point.

Then the group chat starts.

Then someone is 0-4.

Then someone somehow sneaks into the playoffs.

Then the season ends.

And eventually, everybody comes back and does it again.

There's research outside of fantasy sports that gives us another useful lens.

A 2021 PLOS ONE field study, United on Sunday: The effects of secular rituals on social bonding and affect, studied people participating in Sunday Assembly gatherings. In that setting, self-reported social bonding and positive affect increased after the secular ritual.

The study was not about fantasy football, so it doesn't prove that a fantasy draft has the same effect.

But it does make the idea of a recurring fantasy-football ritual more interesting.

The pizza.

The draft.

The group chat.

The trash talk.

The punishment.

The same jokes that somehow come back every season.

Maybe those aren't separate reasons we love fantasy football.

Maybe they're pieces of the ritual.

So Why Do We Keep Playing Fantasy Football?

I started with a giant list.

Football. Stats. Winning. Money. Research. Food. Competition. Punishments. Trash talk. Friends.

And all of those things matter.

But the more I researched them, the more they seemed to collapse into three bigger ideas.

Fantasy football makes football more personal.

It gives us something to compete over.

And maybe most importantly, it gives us a reason to keep showing up.

When I think about my own league, I don't think the craziest part is that we've played fantasy football for 12 years.

It's that somehow, we're still basically the same kids who started it.

We're just bigger versions of our nine-year-old selves.

Different schools. Different jobs. Different lives.

But once a year, everybody walks back into that room and it feels like nothing changed.

Maybe that's why we keep playing.

Not because the fake football team matters that much.

Maybe it's because of everything that comes with it.

And somehow, I still really want to win.

How I Researched This

This article combines fantasy-football participation data from MRI-Simmons, a 2024 Yahoo Sports/DKC Analytics survey of 1,000 U.S. adults interested in playing fantasy football, and peer-reviewed research on social comparison, loss aversion, and secular ritual.

I also compared those findings with my own experience playing in the same fantasy league for 12 years and one interview with another fantasy football player. That interview is anecdotal and is included for perspective, not as representative evidence of all fantasy players.

Research & Sources

• Olson, J. (2023, August 16). Why fantasy football fans should be at the top of your activation list. MRI-Simmons.
• Yahoo Inc. (2024, August 26). New survey showcases trends and surprising insights on behavior of fantasy football players nationwide. Yahoo Inc.
• Brown, A. L., Imai, T., Vieider, F. M., & Camerer, C. F. (2024). Meta-analysis of empirical estimates of loss aversion. Journal of Economic Literature, 62(2), 485–516.
• Tor, A., & Garcia, S. M. (2023). The neuroscience of social comparison and competition. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 23, 920–943.
• Charles, S. J., van Mulukom, V., Brown, J. E., Watts, F., Dunbar, R. I. M., & Farias, M. (2021). United on Sunday: The effects of secular rituals on social bonding and affect. PLOS ONE, 16(1), e0242546.