This begs the question: why would anyone get into the fantasy sports insurance business? My guess: To make money and capitalize on the passion of sports fans … Simply put, the company has to have an upper hand here or it would not bother supporting this endeavor. So who should buy fantasy sports insurance? It seems this service may only make sense for the crème de la crème of owners who are gambling large sums of money and investing a lot of their own valuable time in their team(s). Much like the real NFL where teams only insure the most expensive players with the largest contracts, for the average fantasy fan, this insurance might not make a lot of sense. Only for those who have a lot to lose.
Who buys it is a personal decision, and not mine to preach about. My interest doesn’t lie in who will be buying, but the ramifications of insurance for the sports world in general. I am convinced by the argument that fantasy sports makes every game more interesting from a fans perspective because it gives people something to root for even when their team is not playing. But with insurance on the table, I wonder whether people’s incentives change? Whether they will root differently or participate as a fan differently? What happens when in week 4 your team is last in your fantasy league and you know you have no chance at getting any of your money back, do you start rooting for LT to go down with a season ending injury just so you can collect on insurance?
Its naïve of me to think that people don’t already root for players to get injured, but there is really no telling how far people will take this thing. What is to say some crazed person doesn’t try to injury a player off the field just to collect on a large insurance payout? Will this happen? Probably not or maybe it is as likely as Brady going down again; I am not an insurance actuary. My point is: fantasy insurance is going to change something in the way fans are involved in sports. I am not convinced the change is necessarily for the better…
Visit the site for yourself at http://fantasysportsinsurance.com/ - Matt Aibel
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