Jesús (27 years old) is an opponent and gets up every day at 7:00 in the morning. As soon as he opens one eye, he reaches towards the nightstand and picks up his cell phone, something more than common among young people his age. But Jesus does not check his WhatsApp messages or open Instagram, but rather another app: “It’s the first thing I check when I get up. It’s turning off the alarm and getting into it mister”.
Refers to Mister Fantasy, one of the numerous soccer games fantasy that currently exist in Spain and that are experiencing a real boom among young people, especially men, fans of the beautiful sport. The pioneer was the legendary Comunio, created by a German engineer in 2000. In 2009 it became very popular in Spain and several games began to emerge that copied its system: Biwenger (today fantasy official of the newspaper As), Mr. Fantasy himself, La Liga Fantástica Marca or LaLiga Fantasy, currently associated with the sports newspaper Relevo and official game of LaLiga, are just some examples.
Its operation is very simple: each user acts as a team manager and has a budget to create a squad with real LaLiga players. Every day the market is updated in which managers bid for the footballers they are interested in, without knowing what offer the others have made. Points are obtained according to the performance of the footballers in the real matches of each day, depending on statistical criteria, such as goals or assists, and, in some cases, the scores given to them by reporters from newspapers such as As or Marca. You compete in a virtual league with friends or strangers and the objective is to get more points than your rivals.
This, which, at first glance, seems very simple and unremarkable, has created its own universe on social networks and has become a true phenomenon, which has even reached the halls of Congress. Recently, Gabriel Rufián told the agitator Vito Quiles that he didn’t know if he had done the right thing by signing Pau Cubarsí, Barça defender, to avoid a question.
The social network par excellence for managers fantasy is
It is common for groups of friends to gamble some money to qualify for a reward at the end of the season, which usually consists of a dinner with colleagues, a weekend in a rural house or a player’s shirt. But there are people who take it much further: recently a video went viral in which a young man jumped from a first-floor window to fulfill a “punishment fantasy” for being last in a day.
It is common for friends to gamble some money to qualify for a reward at the end of the season, but there are people who take it further: recently a young man jumped from a first floor to fulfill a ‘fantasy punishment’
There is hardly any public data on the number of users who participate in these types of competitions. Biwenger, for example, the official manager of the newspaper As, he proclaimed himself in 2023 the fantasy most played in Spain, with “more than two million active users” in the 2022-2023 season. LaLiga Fantasy, the official manager of the competition, in response to a query from this newspaper, assures that it has reached more than one million unique users per day and that the number of registrations this season has increased by 145% compared to the previous one.
Its impact continues to grow, to the point that journalists and content creators make a living exclusively talking about this topic. One of the best known is José Carrasco (@JoseCarrasco98), who has more than 74,000 followers on “fantasy”. “It is a way of experiencing the matches in a more intense way,” he argues to explain the possible cause of the boom who live the games fantasy at the moment. And he adds: “If you see so many people talking online about the subject with so much passion, it immediately becomes an experience that you want to live.”
For Jesús, for example, the “mister” is even an excuse to maintain certain friendships: “It is a way of being in contact with those who live abroad. If it weren’t for the game, we would barely talk,” he admits. However, this type of apps They have their danger, closely related to the difficult relationship between young people and smartphones, by the amount of time invested on the platforms.
Spending productive time… and money?
Jesús, for example, is preparing for the entrance exams for the Treasury inspection, very complex oppositions, with an average of two to four years of study to pass, according to what he says. He admits that the game is too distracting: “Clearly, it has taken away my study time. On weekdays [las que no se juegan en fin de semana por necesidades del calendario futbolístico] I get distracted because I’m focused on the games and what my players are doing.” Additionally, recognize that there are days when you can spend more than an hour in the application at a time. If we add to that the time spent reading news from media specialized in content of this type or watching videos from analysts like Carrasco, the time spent playing the game can exceed two or three hours on specific days.
For Jesús (27 years old), who is preparing for an opposition, the time spent playing the game can exceed two or three hours on designated days.
Marc Masip, psychologist and expert in addiction to new technologies, has already dealt with several cases of people like Jesús: “We get young people, some adults, who admit that the first thing they do when they get up is look at who has appeared on the market, that during “All day they are focused on the group chat and that takes away a lot of productive time from work or study.” However, Masip, for the moment, does not believe that these small “hooks” can pose a real addiction problem: “I think it is something healthier than watching TikTok videos, but as in everything, we must have the correct measure ”.
The essence of these games is that they do not use real money, which makes them less dangerous, except for some modes premium that unlock certain functionalities for private leagues, such as the possibility of knowing how many rivals have bid for a player or the famous “clausulazos”, that is, stealing players from your rivals by paying an amount of fake money.
However, this season a new application has appeared, Stars League Fantasy, owned by a businessman from Elche, which introduces prizes in cryptocurrencies and which, as its website boasts, has a differentiating element: “Stars Coins”, virtual currencies. that are purchased with real money and that provide competitive advantages. “Although obviously introducing the option to pay can be dangerous for some people without self-control, normally the majority of the public seeks to play games for free. “fantasy”says Carrasco, who acknowledges that he began creating content fantasy to get rid of another type of addiction: “For me it was a way to get away from sports betting, with which I was beginning to be a little obsessed.”
For me [empezar a crear contenido ‘fantasy’] It was a way to get away from sports betting, which I was starting to be a little obsessed with.
Jose Carrasco
— (@JoseCarrasco98)
Insults and threats
An editorial colleague of Patricia Cazón, a journalist for the newspaper As, also in charge of writing some of the reports on LaLiga matches, received a threat in which a user suggested that they rape her “while in front of you they are slaughtering your entire family.” ”. Cazón writes the chronicles of Atlético de Madrid and, in each match, he awards each player a number of “spades” based on their performance on the field of play. In several of the games fantasythis influences to a greater or lesser extent the final score of the footballers.
“In the case of a woman it is very easy: everything they tell me is related to the verbs suck, scrub and clean. There are people who say tremendous brutalities to you,” says Cazón about the comments he later receives on social networks. The insults and threats occur almost daily, but she assures that she has never felt pressured when it comes to lashing out, even though she has suffered from the “passion” of virtual managers since she began writing for the newspaper nine years ago. . “Even then the monitoring of these games was brutal,” he adds.
Although women usually receive the harshest messages, Santi Giménez, Cazón’s partner in the As, has also had to deal with the obsession of some with men. fantasy: “When I had Twitter, I received an avalanche of insults from people who were absolutely illiterate in football,” says Giménez, who writes Barça chronicles in said medium. Before deleting himself from all social networks, he already had to block words like “Comunio”, “Biwenger” or “fantasy” on Twitter.
As Cazón pointed out, since Comunio was born, threats and insults to chroniclers have been the order of the day. However, in recent seasons, the most fans of this type of game have gone further and are now the footballers and coaches themselves, such as Luis García Plaza, technical director of Alavés, who complain of receiving thousands of messages on social networks. social events with insults for not having played a good game or not having made Carlos Vicente the starter.
The gaming phenomenon fantasy, In addition to being a fashion, it is also a reflection of how toxic behaviors in the world of sports have jumped to the Internet and digital entertainment, also distancing users who participate in these platforms from the traditional way of enjoying competitions, sharing that moment and that space with yours.
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