Fantasy Football’s Vices

Fantasy Football season is finally starting up again. The great American sport (let’s set aside baseball for the time being) offers its fans a chance to compete on the field. Fantasy Football has established on a fanbase, identity, and culture of its own, quite apartment from the game it was created to reflect. Shows like The League follow the lives of those vicariously competing and confirms just how vibrant the Fantasy Football community is.

But isn’t Fantasy Football a little bit weird? Bear with me. I’m a fan of the NFL and a believer that sports communities are an important part of culture (if you need convincing, Alisdair MacIntyre uses it as an example of a “social practice” in After Virtue). It’s another way of finding common ground with dissimilar people; you can strike up a conversation with an otherwise-stranger if you find yourself at the same sports bar huddled around the same small corner TV on which “your” team is playing. The strange thing about Fantasy Football is that it gets rid of a lot of the virtues of football: loyalty, cooperation, and sportsmanship. Fantasy Football doesn’t ask you to stick with your team when it’s had a few rough seasons or loses its star player to injury. It encourages you to get trade away any player who foregoes individual stats for the sake of team success. It’s centered around the idea of an individual winning, through the strategic use of people who suit their ends.

I’m not saying Fantasy Football is an evil practice that’s ruining America. But I do think it’s evocative of the warnings we see in The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. The thesis of the book (more or less) is that technique, or the use of developed means, can only have one goal: that of efficiency. Thus, a technological society sacrifices all other virtues to the goal of efficiency. This may be debatable as a sweeping pronouncement, but it certainly seems to describe what we see in football. Instead of loyal fans, Fantasy Football caters to the needs of those who find rooting for a team that loses inefficient. It offers us the ability to cherry pick from the whole array of players, do some internet research and take an expert’s word on who to drop and pick up, and win through cold calculation. This may be fun, but it certainly isn’t football.