GOOGLE THE NAME OF BILL GAMSON and you will find the homepage of a distinguished professor of sociology at Boston College. Nowhere among the lists of awards, publications and honours does it mention that Gamson is the founding father of fantasy sports - in the words of Sam Walker’s 2006 book Fantasyland, “the Thomas Edison of a worldwide sports movement”.

It was in 1960 that Gamson, a research associate at Harvard at the time, and two friends devised an early form of fantasy baseball, an activity that now occupies some part of the attention of about 6 million adults in North America alone. It was a simple pastime, with participants bidding imaginary dollars for the services of real players, who would score for them in eight statistical areas.

The great leap forward came in 1979 when a freelance editor and writer named Dan Okrent, who had got to know about Gamson’s game, invented a more complex form, known as “roto”, short for “rotisserie” - named after a New York restaurant, La Rotisserie Francaise, where Okrent and the friends who would form the first roto league regularly met.

This variant, in which 12 or so participants divide up the cream of Major League players at a preseason auction or draft, became the basis for most fantasy baseball leagues after word spread through the media connections of Okrent and some of the other managers. Some leagues are more competitive than others, with entry fees that fund end-of-season prize--money, while fantasy professionals - mainly writers on fantasy journals and websites - compete in high-profile expert leagues whose results are in the public domain.

The ready availability of comprehensive statistics made baseball ideal for fantasy purposes, but it soon became apparent that any sport or activity in which numbers can be added up can have a fantasy version, so fantasy American football soon followed, with scoring categories including touchdowns, receiving yards, rushing yards and interceptions.

The coming of the internet and its easy access to information led to an explosion in fantasy sport websites. Now golf, NASCAR, bass fishing, curling and even sumo have fantasy leagues. It has been estimated that 7 per cent of United States citizens play some form of fantasy game.

Members of the legal profession play Fantasy Supreme Court and some companies have barred access to fantasy games sites on office computers to prevent employees spending the entire day puzzling over sports statistics rather than pork-belly futures. Celebrities such as Meatloaf are fantasy NFL addicts, but there are now even fantasy celebrity leagues such as fafarazzi.com, where players earn points depending on the publicity their “players” receive.

Fantasy football first reached the UK in 1991, starting with specialist books before being picked up by newspapers, who saw it as an ideal way to attract readers and build databases. Popularity increased thanks to Dominik Diamond’s BBC Radio 5 Live programme, Fantasy Football League, which transferred to BBC2, where it was hosted by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. The TV show used a celebrity fantasy league as an excuse for a comedy programme; the celebrities, including Damon Albarn, of Blur, and Nick Hornby feigned varying degrees of interest and it became little more than an excuse for reenactments of great football moments and Jeff Astle singing. The presenters regarded their resident expert, Angus Loughran, alias “Statto”, with a mixture of awe and contempt, as did many viewers.

Little did they suspect that addiction to fantasy sports brought the risk of actually becoming Statto, only more so. Interest might have been expected to peak after Euro ’96, when Skinner and Baddiel helped to write the anthemic Three Lions, but although the programme came to the end of its natural life, fantasy football went from strength to strength as increased internet access speeds made participation easier.

Walker, a sports columnist with The Wall Street Journal, wrote Fantasyland about his first experience of a fantasy baseball league. It was subtitled “a season on baseball’s lunatic fringe”, but the fantasy business is now a very serious one. Walker estimates that more than $1 billion (about £500 million) is spent annually on fantasy gaming, including league entry fees, subscriptions to specialist fantasy sites and premium television sports packages. “No way,” he quotes Okrent as saying about his invention, “did I have the idea that it would mushroom to the preposterous size it has reached.”

Growth industry

20m - Adults in North America who play fantasy sports.

3 - Hours the average fantasy sports player spends managing their teams each week.

£75 - The average spent by players on fantasy American football. The average participant is also involved in an average of 2.4 NFL fantasy leagues a year.

60 - Percentage of fantasy sports players who spend more than an hour a day thinking about their teams, according to a sociological analysis of online fantasy players for Fortune magazine in December 2005.

£95m - Estimated productivity lost by employers in the United States as a result of fantasy American football during the 2005 NFL season, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a workplace consultancy. The figure is based conservatively on fantasy players taking only ten minutes out of their workday to manage their teams.

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