Fantasy Football in 2026: What Players Really Think
08/09/2026 | MEMBERS
What Fantasy Players Really Think: Inside Fantasy Football Fest
What keeps millions of fantasy football players coming back season after season? Is it the competition? The challenge of making better decisions? A deeper connection with football? Or is something else ultimately more important?
The UK Fantasy Sports Forum went to Fantasy Football Fest to hear directly from the people who play the game. We spoke to fantasy players about how they got started, how fantasy has changed their relationship with football, what goes into their decisions each week and how they think the game is changing. And their answers raised some interesting questions for anyone involved in the future of fantasy sports.
A game that's changing
The fantasy experience today looks very different from the one many long-term players first encountered. Players now have access to an extraordinary amount of content, data, analysis and technology. The information that once provided an advantage can increasingly be found by almost anyone. So where does that leave individual judgement? And as AI makes sophisticated analysis even more accessible, does it level the playing field, or risk taking away part of what makes fantasy enjoyable in the first place?
The people we spoke to didn't all agree.
More isn't necessarily better
We also asked players a deceptively simple question: what would you improve?
For an industry naturally focused on product development and innovation, some of the responses are worth paying attention to. They raise a broader question about what players actually value — and whether improving a fantasy product always means adding more to it.
Winning vs community
Perhaps the biggest contrast came when we asked about winning. One player told us they'd happily finish eight millionth if they'd enjoyed themselves. Another is convinced they'll one day be ranked number one in the world. Those sound like completely different relationships with fantasy football. But listen to the conversations in full and something interesting starts to connect them.
It was also there when we asked everyone to complete the same sentence: “fantasy football is great because…”
The consistency in what came back was difficult to ignore, and it led us to a bigger conclusion about what fantasy games might actually be building, whether they consciously set out to or not.
Watch the full film
In our new film from Fantasy Football Fest, we let the players tell the story themselves.
We explore:
how fantasy changes people's relationship with sport;
what a modern fantasy player's week actually looks like;
the growing influence of creators, data and AI;
how players think the game has changed;
what they would, and wouldn't, improve;
and the relationship between competition, winning and community.
The full film, including our conclusions about what these conversations could mean for fantasy operators and the wider industry, is available to UKFSF members.
Available to UKFSF members. Join UKFSF to watch in full and access our growing programme of fantasy sports insight.