Not Your Boyfriend's Fantasy League
How women are infiltrating the fantasy racing space while disrupting the sports industry altogether
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When Maeve White first sat down to watch Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” in 2020 with her now-fiancé, she didn’t think it was much more than a show about cars — something she had never shown interest in before. Now, the 28-year-old shares technical tire analysis, driver market features and race breakdowns with her nearly 20,000 TikTok followers. In between trending TikTok sounds and breaking news, White invites viewers to tag along as she updates her Formula 1 Fantasy roster.
F1 Fantasy dropped in 2018 as a way to grow buzz around the elite racing series stateside and capitalize on the lucrative fantasy football market. By 2023, the F1 game had reached 2.3-plus million global players. While F1 did not respond to requests for user demographic data, women make up a larger chunk of both the fantasy sports market and F1’s viewership base than ever before: In November 2023, F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali reported that 40 percent of the sport’s global fanbase was female, an eight percent increase from 2017.
Despite record female engagement, fantasy sports haven’t always landed with female audiences.
The words “fantasy” and “sports” conjure up an image of a dimly lit man cave with maybe a few beer cans strewn about. A “welcome female sports fans” banner doesn’t quite fit into the picture.
But the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association (FSGA) is pushing against that narrative. The advocacy group, describing itself as the “voice for 60 million fantasy sports players in the United States and Canada,” wants to take fantasy sports’ reputation as an activity solely for mom’s basement dwellers and widen its appeal.
The FSGA has ramped up fantasy sports marketing to women in recent years, seeing a significant rise since the association first began collecting player data in 2017 with the help of research company Angus Reid. In 2022, 35 percent of fantasy players were female, a jump from 29 percent in 2017.
“It's a more inclusive space than it ever used to be,” Paul Charchian, former chair of the FSGA and current co-chair of its research committee, said. “[It’s] a more welcoming space for [people] outside of its traditional demographic.”
Fantasy sports got its name in the mid-1980s. By the end of the decade, an estimated 500,000 people participated in sports prediction and monitoring games. While official fantasy sports leagues have grown exponentially in popularity since (despite a dip in 2004, 2005 and 2009), the concept far outdates its name. In the mid-19th century, a coin and spring-powered contraption allowed fans to predict baseball outcomes. It wasn’t until the 1960s that baseball’s statistics-heavy layout gathered fans in forecasting on-base percentages and batting averages and heralded the fantasy format known today.
Fantasy sports may teach players Stats 101, but not everyone is convinced by the game’s significance or legality.
“For a long time, people didn't understand where fantasy sports was relative to gambling,” the FSGA said. “A lot of the bigger [sports] leagues just didn't feel comfortable making investments in fantasy sports.”
But media magnates saw a revenue stream in fantasy sports that outweighed its risks and invested when fantasy sports was just beginning to boom. ESPN showed investing early was profitable and set the sports media company up to become the most popular place to play, according to the FSGA.
The fantasy market is only projected to swell. Business Wire predicts the global fantasy sports market revenue to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14 percent by 2026. Fantasy NFL’s $70 billion industry value is expected to surge to greater heights as well, according to Forbes.
Racing’s slow fantasy growth stateside
Like baseball, motorsport is an overflowing cup of stats.
The F1 game allows users to get as deep into the data as they prefer and use driver stats, like Charles Leclerc’s record for the most pole positions a driver has failed to convert to wins, to make strategic strategy decisions. With $100 million in the bank, players can choose two different constructors, or teams, and seven drivers. In the 2023 edition of F1 Fantasy, users could transfer two drivers ahead of each grand prix, taking out the traditional user-to-user trade action of fantasy sports. Players scored points in 2023 for overtakes, finishing position, team rank and the fastest pit stop times.
A quick search reveals Reddit threads with detailed driver valuation instructions and lengthy YouTube videos explaining how to stretch the team budget. The rise in motorsport content creators on social media platforms has transferred closed-door strategy meetings to X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and TikTok.
“I saw F1 posted the top selected drivers, and I literally had these exact same drivers on my team,” White recalled. “I ended up posting about that, and then I just saw that there were tons of questions in the comments: What is this? Is this an app? Is this a website? How do I sign up? How does it work?”
“That rang this bell that not that many people actually know what this is.”
The 2023 season’s sprint format and altered fantasy points system meant White’s direct message inbox and comment section were filled with users asking for more information.
For White, the beauty of fantasy racing lies in the different levels of engagement. While White attended the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, in October and religiously checks F1’s social media accounts for breaking news, other fans occasionally check in with the sport come race day. White acts as an interpreter between the two camps.
“There's still a lot of people who are what I would call ‘novice’ F1 fans,” White said. “[There is] still a lot of room for people to get more and more involved.”
Before F1, White had never joined a fantasy sports league. She doesn’t want new fans to feel the way she did as an occasional football spectator.
“[Fantasy football] definitely seemed really intimidating to me as someone who ‘casually’ watched football,” White said. “I would go to a bar and watch a football game and know how the point scoring worked and generally understand what's happening but definitely don't have the level of detail to know the best running back in the country or the best offensive lineman.”
White said she wouldn’t have been able to identify what a “good” stat was in the sport. Fantasy sports’ male-dominated culture didn’t help ease the daunting task of joining a league.
Despite this, fantasy football has seen the greatest spike in female participation. A whopping 79 percent of fantasy players participate in fantasy football in the U.S. and Canada, while women make up 38 percent of those involved, according to the North American Society for Sport Management.
Fantasy racing is growing at a slower pace. In 2022, only nine percent of fantasy players participated in NASCAR with 13 percent participating in daily fantasy games.
“We only have three out of the 2,000 [surveyed] that answered F1,” the FSGA said. “We know F1 is growing here, and it's super obvious, and the Las Vegas event [is] the indicator of how much it's grown here, but we really are not seeing it meaningfully gain here yet…I'm sure it will come in time. Every sport that gets big ends up getting a sizable fantasy following at some point.”
F1 is big.
The elite racing series brings in one billion viewers over a season with U.S. viewership rising from 500,000 in 2018 to 1.4 million in 2022, according to ESPN.
While F1 has all the ingredients for success (growth in the American consciousness and among female spectators), fantasy sports haven’t always stuck in sports-obsessed countries. In the United Kingdom, fantasy soccer failed to stack up to the nation’s robust and established sports betting industry, the FSGA said.
Fantasy sports’ American roots and F1’s official fantasy sponsorship may improve fantasy racing’s chances, but that's only possible if popularity remains consistent.
Despite record viewership in recent years, the 2023 Miami Grand Prix saw a 25 percent dip in U.S. viewership — something fans collectively attribute to Red Bull driver Max Verstappen’s dominant winning streak. The interest and participation of fantasy players over the course of any sporting season is correlated with players’ team success and failures, said the FSGA.
F1 Fantasy players may have not been motivated to update their driver lineup come September when there seemed no end in sight to Verstappen’s record-breaking ten consecutive wins, but White sees a silver lining in the monotonous wins.
“There were obviously other teams like Mercedes that were dominating [previously]. Maybe it's some sort of pendulum that swings at some point or [another] when Red Bull isn’t dominating anymore and then people get excited again,” White said. “With other sports, there's something fun about cheering for the underdog; the [New England] Patriots in football for a while was the most dominant team. People kept watching because they wanted someone to beat the Patriots or because they are Patriots fans and wanted to continue watching to see their team dominate.”
Social media brought a new era of fantasy sports
Making up as much as 64 percent of new fans and 40 percent of total viewers, women and girls are shaking up the sport while carving out an online community. Although these DRS devotees are taking over TikTok, female fans are also, in the case of White, infiltrating the male-dominated space of fantasy racing.
2023 was a big year for women in sports. As Taylor Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce brought more women into the football stands and the stardom of female professional basketball players increased, women are reclaiming the old boys’ club of basketball brackets and competitive cliques.
But F1 managed to stray from the pack as female content creators changed the way F1 social media teams interact with fans and create viral content. It’s hard to ignore not just the purchasing power of female racing fans, but also their swift impact on the sport’s marketability and online fan space.
F1 content creators are attempting to create a community in an increasingly digital fantasy landscape. While F1’s mega-league of faceless usernames creates a lower-stakes entry into fantasy sports, it has also fractured a bit of its magic.
“In the old days, people would have to score it by hand and, to trade drivers [or players], call a commissioner on the phone and ask him to make that trade,” the FSGA said.
Accessibility may have increased with the age of the internet as barriers to playing broke down, but the F1 game’s anonymity doesn’t always allow for community building.
White’s online platform has challenged that as she creates leagues with friends and followers.
When White started creating content on social media, she was surprised by the amount of men who liked and commented on her posts, something she attributes to F1’s traditionally male audience. In the couple of years since she started her account @f1nalcorner, White’s engagement demographics have shifted alongside F1’s viewership, welcoming more women and Americans into the sport.
“[Now engagement is] 40 percent female and 60 percent male,” White said. “But I think at one point it was probably closer to 20:80.”
Women attempting to break the glass ceiling in racing aren’t always taken kindly or seriously. Motorsport is traditionally male-dominated and caters to Europeans. An American woman sharing thoroughly researched technical information in a TikTok format contradicts that image.
As fangirl culture rises, a section of male F1 fans has pushed back against the term “fanboy” in an attempt to degrade women’s interest in the sport. Other fans gladly label themselves as such.
While White firmly expressed there are welcoming groups within the sport, especially one-on-one interactions, her comment section hasn’t always reflected a safe space for girl power.
“I really just try not to take it seriously,” White said. “Obviously, when you read it that sucks, but at the same time, there are so many people clearly engaging by commenting and sharing that I just don't really take it personally.”
White and her fiancé’s favorite comment to quote is “Women detected, opinion rejected.”
At the end of the day, comments are brushed off, made a joke of and serve as fuel to bring even more women into the sport.