Fantasy sports platform DraftKings might be about to change how the UK watches sport.
Well, one sport. "We’re under no illusion that our top three sports here won’t be anything else than football, football and football," Draft Kings chief international offer (CIO) Jeffrey Haas told WIRED in an exclusive interview.
Available in the UK from 5 February, the service lets fans compete with each other across 11 sports, including NFL, NBA and golf. And, yes, Premier League soccer. "The UK was a logical fit for us. Sports fans here are very passionate, everyone talks about football," Haas said.
Even though the English Premier League and Champions League were introduced on the US platform two years ago and count 200,000 players overseas, the UK launch made it necessary to rethink the platform’s scoring system, Draft Kings co-founder and chief revenue officer Matt Kalish explained.
The first football scoring included only goals, assists and saves, he said, which was not satisfying enough for the surveyed audience. The scoring now includes 19 different play events. "It encourages players to follow along for the whole game, because even clean sheets at the end of the match are relevant when you have individual players in contest," Haas said. Other UK version tweaks included modifying US terms: "select" instead of “draft" and -- of course -- "football" instead of "soccer".
WIRED spoke to Haas (JS) and Kalish (MK) about how the service will change in the UK, why it has decided to launch now, and what the future holds for US sports as they continue to expand here in the UK.
This is a partial transcript edited for space and clarity.
[i]
Why launch in the UK now?
MK: The UK was a logical fit for us, sports fans here are very passionate, and everyone talks about football. We built a very strong Premier League and Champions League product, and we also have golf, [for a total of] 11 sports that we offer. We are very compatible, and a very good fit for the market.
The biggest difference in the UK is the affinity for different sports. Big sports fans are going to be passionate about whatever sports they follow, and fantasy is a great way to deepen that engagement. It’s a matter of having the sports that people want, we made sure to have a very good football product and golf product. It wouldn’t have made sense to launch with only US popular sports here.
How different is the UK product?
MK: Everybody comes together on the platform in one big pool -- that’s one of the big main benefits to the UK consumers -- there’s already six million users on the platform they can compete with, any sort of marketplace product is better with more users on it. If there’s only 10 players it's not as fun as if there are millions. In terms of the rules, we customised very much towards UK preferences, when you build a lineup it’s virtually identical to what managers would put on the pitch, eleven players with the same positions as in real life. I think the score is deep enough, robust enough, we’ve done a lot of testing and iterated a few times on that product.
JH: It’s not like we don’t have any DNA for football and that we're starting from scratch; we introduced English Premier League and Champions League two and a half years ago, so this is the third full season. We have more than 200,00 unique football players for in North America today so there’s already a substantial population who are participating in these games and enjoying it. We also have Major League Soccer, which is growing in the US. And we’re seeing 'proper' football growing in the US since the last World Cup, it’s becoming increasingly mainstream.
Do you see an interest in US sports like the NFL in the UK as well?
JH: Matt and I had the opportunity to go to one of the NFL matches here in Wembley, and it was awesome. They sold out all three matches, 83 000 people, and of course there were some American tourists but it was mostly a British audience and the NFL is doing a phenomenal job at growing their audience here in the UK. We also saw the NBA at the O2 a week and a half ago, and there’s also the news of baseball wanting to expand to the UK as well. So there really is a precedent.
We're under no illusion that our top three sports in the UK won’t be anything else than football, football and football, but we’re definitely hoping that we can grow the audiences for these sports in the UK.
Betting on football has a long tradition in the UK, whereas daily fantasy sports focuses on the performance of individual players. How are you going to work with that?
JH: So, we don’t have a betting product. You’re not betting on the individual results of a club, what you’re doing is you’re using your statistical skills to understand and analyse the likelihood of individual players across multiple teams and multiple games and their likelihood to succeed in those games, in order to create the best possible lineup in one of our contests. You’re not actually entering a contest entry based on the results of the games, but on the results of individual players during the games, and there are millions of hypothetical combinations of players you could put to create a successful lineup.
Soccer is quite different from other sports in terms of statistics, how will that work?
JH: The scoring is a lot lower in football than in a lot of American sports.
MK: It’s extremely deep I think, obviously the goals and scoring a goal are very important in the fantasy league, but I think we’ve gotten into the next level where we consider every relevant play in the game as something that’s a scoring event for us. So the scoring events are inclusive pretty much every play event in the match: cross, fouls, pretty much everything that you would think of as a fan. And this is an evolution, it took us some time to get to. When we first started, we were looking for goals and assists and saves and that was pretty much it. The players weren’t satisfied enough so we kept asking, what do you think it’s important enough to be part of our scoring.
It encourages players to follow along for the whole of the game, because even clean sheets at the end of the match are relevant. So even if the game is 3-1 wash out, or 3-0 washout, you’re still interested all the way through the end because you have individual players in contest that have a clean sheet that impacts your raw score.
DraftKings has been negatively affected by the recent so-called 'inside trading' scandal. How have you responded to that and how will it affect the UK business, if at all?
JH: In respect of the staff member, it was a complete misunderstanding, and it got blown out of proportion by the US media. We had a staff member who had access to some information and erroneously published it online -- he made an error in his process but he took no advantage of it. Furthermore he was participating in an event on a competitor’s site but he had no access to privileged information when he took these actions of his own in order to play. So it was a misunderstanding in respect to when these triggers occurred.
It has been several months so I don’t have the data and the specific times but what I can tell you is we had an independent third party audit and they did a full audit of all communications around this and they concluded that there was no evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever. It has been provided by anyone who has been interested in that and it has met with their satisfaction. So that is not an issue today, we don’t see it as an ongoing matter.
We take our business very seriously, we are a responsible operator, and we offer games that are safe for players to play. Furthermore we are regulated by the UKGC, so we have very strict protocols in place that govern who has access to data under what circumstances and it is vital that we are respectful of those regulatory requirements at all times. So the kind of sensitive information that would give somebody advantage in a game would not be available to a staff member in a way that it would give them advantage. In respect of this individual, he received this information on that event after the event had already closed. I could give you a detailed record of the times when that happened.
You have a gambling license in the UK, so how is daily fantasy not gambling?
JH: So in 2005, the UK GC introduced a comprehensive a regulatory review of the rules and practices in the UK by which they were going to regulate all games and contests regardless of element of skill. So in order for us to operate in the UK, we have to have a license from the UKGC. So we told them about our product and they advised us that the category for our product was pool-betting. We’re operating in the UK under a pool-betting license.
That being the case, there’s a massive difference in every single jurisdiction we may wish to expand into: in Malta, they are introducing a new skill-gaming regime, with two classes of skill-gaming available -- one for fantasy sports and the other for e-sports, so you need to require a skill gaming license if you want to play competitive League of Legends, etc. In Denmark they have a new licensing regime for manager games. So as we take a global view, we recognise that every single jurisdiction may look at our product differently, and in the UK we’re not like anything else that’s out there.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
