MLS "Fantasy"

Oh, the world of fantasy sports! As Donald Trump might say on the 'Apprentice', fantasy sports is a $4 billion dollar a year industry in the US.

Currently, the most popular sports are baseball and football. Third would be basketball. These sports lend themselves very well to a fantasy point scale.

In the past few years, other sports have attempted to duplicate this success but the result isn't the same. MLS has released the rules for the 2008 Fantasy Challenge, and it's a mixed bag.

In soccer, it's tough to make it work because forwards score much more often than midfielders and light years more than defenders. Therefore, they have to offer strange ways to compensate for defenders and keepers, mostly by giving them big bonuses for not giving up goals, small deductions for goals allowed, and even a point per 10 minutes played.

I definitely agree that MLS is doing the best it can to try and create a compelling scheme to get more people interested in following the league on a greater level, but baseball and football are still better optimized for the fantasy realm.

I'm not sure how they can do it, but soccer leagues might want to start looking into ways to more seriously tweak the 'fantasy' game to appeal to soccer, or form a different means altogether of hooking people up with the sport on a deeper level.