Serving a passionate community is probably one of the hardest challenges to accomplish—ever. Are football fans your target audience? They are both predictable and loyal. You will have no problem modeling user expectations.

Your challenge centers on managing them.

Football fans know everything—at least they think they do. Tactics, formations, players, field grass, coaches’ decisions—you name it—they are ever-ready to discuss any aspect of the game for hours on end and cross verbal swords with friends or foes.

Your main issue (linked to your challenge of managing them) lies in delivering high-quality fantasy sports website.

In this post, we discuss how to start a fantasy sports website sports fans will love. With every fantasy sports solution, the finely tuned technical side of the project is crucial for overall success.

What do fans love about fantasy sports websites?

The query ‘how to start a fantasy sports website’ is popular on such resources as Quora, Reddit, and Google.

Why?

Because fans like the question ‘what if..?’

  • What if it had not been raining so badly?
  • What if the striker had scored that goal?
  • What if that left defender had been substituted 20 minutes earlier?

Plus, lots of other things—just let your imagination go wild.

In real life, even top-ranked squads lose competitions.

In an alternative world, everything can turn out differently.

This is why fantasy football leagues are highly popular competitive games. Fantasy football is a chance to prove theory with practice.

However, success in fantasy football depends on various factors we call knowledge and experience, not just on luck or prophecy. Beating others in fantasy tournaments will quickly show how brilliant someone’s ideas are.

Also, fantasy football websites are different. Fantasy football is a mix of a sports manager and betting office. Nevertheless, a fantasy football tournament does not look like any of that.

A gamer becomes a team manager, but unlike the sports manager, the team consists of real football players. Gamers choose players who they think will do their best and get points based on their achievements in actual games (e.g., Cristiano Ronaldo scored two goals and got a yellow card in the Champions League; therefore, gamers who picked him up get +250 for the goals and –20 for the card).

Unlike betting, fantasy football lasts as long as a real football tournament lasts (e.g., Copa América 2018). Gamers do not win or lose everything immediately in one game just by surrendering to the temptation to win a little bit more.

Both betting and fantasy football are games with unpredictable information, so gamers are always dealing with uncertainty. But in fantasy football, gamers are the ones who define (i.e., get control over) the squad, unlike betting where participants pick up what there is available for them.

But if you want to attract rabid fans, you must be able to answer the question, how to create a fantasy sports website?

Briefly, it is simpler with previous experience. Below we share our experiences to help you.

How to create a fantasy sports website: product development lifecycle

Fantasy leagues are not revolutionizing gaming. This type of competition has been around for several decades. Its basic structure and modules are similar to those used to create any betting service (e.g., a broker’s board).

Indeed, the recipe on how to start a fantasy sports website differs from that of a betting competition. Fantasy football website has issues regarding its goals and its target audience.

Therefore, we started with our expertise of existing modules and reused code to shorten the time needed to make the development cost effective. The rest of the time on the project was spent on customization, design, integration of third-party resources, testing, and adjustment.

Here is an example of a website IT Craft team developed for its client from Latin America.

Mock-ups

For fantasy football websites, our designer creates mock-ups of all pages and sends them to the customer for approval.

Administration panel

Our goal was to create a service that customers could manage on their own. Therefore, we developed an easy-to-adjust administration panel any responsible person can use to set up rules, manage winnings, close the squads at a designated time, and block any changes to prevent cheating.

Third party services integration

Used for quick, reliable match data delivery (i.e., trustworthy calculations), we integrated Data Factory statistics feed based on customers’ recommendations.

PayPal or League Swipe is integrated into fantasy football websites to manage account funds and pay out winnings.

How to create a fantasy football app: a cost-effective approach

It is impossible to imagine a fantasy football service unavailable from smartphones. Such service will miss its core audience. How to reach smartphone users? Certainly, the best way to access is to create a fantasy sport app.

Still, many owners have constrained budgets to launch a fantasy sports app. Is there any cost-effective approach to create fantasy sports app?

Yes, businesses should try hybrid fantasy sports app development. This means that development team can reuse many of website components for fantasy sports app development making fast delivery possible.

To make this happen, we use responsive design technology.

All screens display beautifully on both desktop and mobile devices.

GET adaptiveResponsive website is the best choice that you can get to grow your audience

fantasy sport development process

What other challenges are technically important?

Full product development cycle

We fully develop your service from analyzing your requirements and budget, and to the stage of the working stage.

  • select your package or let us know if you need help
  • we will build a timeline of development phases
  • then development process goes
  • final testing on all devices and push project LIVE

Below is our list of core topics that challenge fantasy football game development and their respective solutions:

  • quick response
    stability
    data integrity

    To deliver high-performance stable service we use:

    • Linux
    • Apache
    • MySQL
    • PHP
    • Yii2 framework as a backbone (it is an open-source MVC framework which is based on the LAMP stack)
  • cheating

    Some (not a complete list) actions against cheating:

    • calculations only on the server (back-end) side;
    • back-end and front-end of the system are separated. Users have no access to the back-end;
    • ‘close’ time is only managed by the administrator; no updating instruments;

    … and more

  • social integration
    Service has its own Facebook page, Vimeo, and Twitter accounts
  • personalization
    Players are greeted with personalized letters. They can choose avatars, etc.
  • translation
    The website has Spanish, English, and Portuguese versions

Surprisingly, product owners can only test their own fantasy football services during football matches, usually once or twice a week. Everyone must wait until the next match day to see the improvements.

In conclusion

Fantasy football is addictive and time consuming. Tournament participation requires regular changes in the virtual squad to compete with other gamers. Assuming that regular championships last about nine months, this would not be a big deal for those who live and breathe the game.

IT Craft has accumulated expertise on how to create a fantasy sports website and a dedicated mobile app. This makes it possible for our clients to have their own fantasy football competitions delivered faster and for less.

You can start either with a website or with fantasy sports app development.