The Euroleague Fantasy Challenge is still in everybody’s mind and the changes in the different teams make some managers go crazy. But I was wondering a bit what is the success of this game?
When I did my research on the number of teams per country, I came up with a total of about 47,000 teams that are from one European country. If you add the different non-European participants and the new teams added after my research, you can come up roughly to a number of around 50,000 teams in total. That sounds great at a first look. But then check the following.
In the news of last year’s final winners, the Euroleague announced the total number of participating teams: +-70,000. You can also go back to the edition of the year 2005-06 and you will find a number of +-50,000 teams with about 16,000 participants. You see, that after the rise to a high in 2006-07, there was a decline coming to this year’s competition.
Can we take the conclusion out of this that the number of participants, even if we are not at the end of the season has gone back to the levels of 2005-06? Are there really only 15,000-20,000 people having Euroleague Fantasy Challenge teams? When you think this is impressive, check what the "mother" of European Fantasy Leagues is having as participants.
Han disputado la novena jornada un total de 342.567 equipos.
I don’t speak Spanish but I understand that this means that 342,567 teams participated to the ninth day of competition this weekend. This is nearly 7 times as much as the Euroleague Fantasy Challenge with a game that is just available in Spanish and just covers the Spanish ACB.
Another comparison I can make is in relation with the Fantasy leagues organized by Crossover-Online and Five Mag in Germany. In their NBA league, there are actually 6,000 teams. And there is only one team allowed per user. And in their specific German Bundesliga Fantasy league, there are still nearly 1,500 participants. (in the EFC, there are only about 500 TEAMS from Germany)
So all in all, there seems to be a problem with the Euroleague Fantasy challenge as the number of participants in declining and is far below the top game of the continent.
