Andy Collins has just sent out the first fantasy football email update of the season and it's bad news for me. I'm currently positioned 18th out of 22 in our league. And there was me thinking that my finely-tuned research methods were infallible. This is my worst start since I can remember and in 2 or 3 weeks, when the season has settled down a little, I'll have to do a bit of analysis to see which players are letting me down. In the immediate term, hopefully Gerrard's goal yesterday will have made a bit of a difference.
Both the initial selection of players and transfer decisions in fantasy football would be a lot easier if the data were open. I've been arguing, at an informal / social level, for some time within Talis that the biggest semantic web opportunity out there is not education, but is in fact sport. Sport is something that loads and loads of people, from all sorts of backgrounds, are interested in, and certain sports in particular, e.g. football; cricket; baseball, lend themselves to both statistical and qualitative analysis. Crucially, it's not just the sports professionals that engage in that analysis, but lay people as well. The ongoing success of fantasy football / cricket / baseball and so on demonstrate a widespread hunger for active engagement in professional sports, and many many people like myself are part of leagues that may be organised by the media, notably the Telegraph and the Times in the UK, or more grassroots e.g. the league that Andy organises for his friends. It's easy to see that there would be considerable demand for semantic data services around sports, but equally, there's a significant number of people who would be willing to contribute data, in my opinion. Neither the Telegraph nor the Times provide APIs for people such as Andy, and as a result he has to perform a lot of the calculations manually, and the data is nowhere near as rich as it could be. The semantic web could enable relationships to be discovered in the performance of individual players, clubs and countries that aren't immediately apparent, as well as making statistics more accessible. My friends and I each pay £23 a year into Andy's league, so monetisation possibilities are readily apparent.
To the "player" who successfully develops a semantic platform for sports lovers, then, the spoils.
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