Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) has never captured the attention of the UK market in the same way it has North America, first evidenced by FanDuel withdrawing from the UK in 2017.
Nevertheless, that didn’t deter Fantasy Gameday from acquiring a licence from the Gambling Commission in 2023, something co-founder Gurmeet Sahni tells EGR was an “incredibly difficult” process. From there, Sahni and fellow co-founders Ankit Vohra and Mark Atkinson set about eating into the market share of DraftKings, only for the Boston-headquartered operator to retreat from the UK in October last year.
The gap left by DraftKings presented an unexpected opportunity for Fantasy Gameday to take advantage of, with results arriving instantly. Traffic to the app and website spiked 550% in the aftermath of the US market leader’s exit, with DFS players onboarding to the Fantasy Gameday platform for the final three months of the 2024 NFL season.
Now, with the 2025 campaign on the horizon, Sahni details what the DFS operator has in store for its customers and why expansion into other markets and sports are on hold until the NFL UK scene is secured.
EGR: You market yourself as “For UK fans, created by UK fans”. How did the concept of Fantasy Gameday come about?
Gurmeet Sahni [GS]: There were three co-founders: me, Ankit Vohra and Mark Atkinson. It came about over three years ago now. Ankit and I are huge NFL fans. We love the sport, but we also love fantasy American football. We felt that in the UK there were a lot of good options for playing season-long fantasy football on free-to-play apps.
But when it came to daily fantasy, we were underwhelmed by the options out there and felt UK fans like us were underserved. We thought: ‘You know what? Let’s give this a go. Let’s try and create our own.’ Mark has a background in app development, so we got him on board, and he set about creating this piece of tech. We took it in stages. It was a huge undertaking. Obviously, the key element to that was obtaining a UK gambling licence.
EGR: Was that a difficult process?
GS: Incredibly difficult. We [the UK] are one of the strictest countries in the world for gambling regulation, and for good reason. We’re a world leader when it comes to gambling regulations. It was a long process. We had a great team of people who supported us and advised us through it. We obtained our licence in March 2023 and are regulated for full betting in the UK, including Northern Ireland. We’re not a bookmaker; our licence doesn’t allow us to be and nor do we want to be because we want fantasy sports and daily fantasy sports to be social and fun, and that’s what our licence covers.
EGR: DraftKings announced it was exiting the UK market in October 2024. How did that alter your strategy, and did you find you were picking up players from DraftKings?
GS: We had no idea that announcement was coming. I woke up on a Friday morning in early October 2024 and my phone was lit up with messages and social media comments. That massively altered things for us as a business. What we saw overnight was a lot of customers who were using their platform coming to us. We had a 550% increase in traffic on our app and a five-fold increase in lineups entered that week. That helped us, no doubt about it.
We had been around since the 2023 NFL season, but it was more like a beta [mode]. We didn’t really market ourselves, we just wanted to make sure all our tech worked and everything was running smoothly. Last season was our first proper season in business and DraftKings leaving did change things for us.
EGR: What does your marketing strategy consist of?
GS: Last season we invested some funds into social media advertising and YouTube advertising. A key marketing strategy for us are UK podcasters. They’ve been a fantastic support from the day we launched. They talk about their favourite fantasy players for the week and lineups – that’s been great. We have also teamed up with some well-known sports bars in the UK.
We have our T-shirts and stuff like that at those bars on gamedays, and that’s something we want to do even more moving forward because it goes perfectly with playing fantasy sports and watching RedZone [on Sky Sports] on a Sunday with your mates. It’s a perfect social thing, and we want to be a social platform where you play with other NFL fans and your mates.
We want to be a little bit different from the norm. We’re a small business, so we are quite nimble with how we can make decisions. We have been involved with the Cornwall Monarchs [American Football Club] as sponsors for the last two seasons. We want to support grassroots sports in the UK. I know in other sports, the Premier League, gambling sponsorship has received a lot of kickback. We don’t want that.
EGR: What responsible gambling initiatives do you have in place?
GS: There are spend limits, as we don’t want people getting carried away and spending beyond their means. I don’t want to just say these things about how we’re trying to be responsible and social by putting those things into action. Our spend limits and our lower price points of £3, £7.50 and £25 [for contest entries] is evidence of that. I’ve read about how someone can sign up [to an operator] and put down a £15,000 deposit the following day. With us, it’s five lineups maximum and our most expensive entry point is £25. We don’t want to be in a situation like other DFS apps where you see a leaderboard and it’s roughly 40 entries from the same person. We wanted to avoid that scenario because it encourages people to spend beyond their means. That isn’t the type of dynamic we were going for, so we’ve put spend limits in place.
EGR: What do you have in the pipeline for your third NFL season?
GS: We introduced new games during the season last year. Our main game is Sunday Stars [pick a team and a captain who earns double points, the higher you rank the more you win] and we introduced different entry levels for that. Now we have a game called Ballers [only pick players from teams playing each other], which is for prime-time games on Monday, Thursday and Sunday nights.
We’ve got a lot more options of games to play. During this off-season we are developing a new pick’em game called Triple Crown, which will be ready to launch for the new season in September. Pick’em games are hugely popular in North America and that’s something we’re looking to bring in [to the UK].
In our games, the top 20% win money and that was a conscious decision on our part – we want more people who enter to win as opposed to it being difficult. We’ve had some people come to us and say: ‘We’re not too sure about your payouts. We feel there should be bigger disparity between winning and coming in that 20th percentile.’ We wanted to narrow that gap. One of the things we are looking at is having another game with a different payout structure to keep those fans happy, who want a bigger prize for coming first. That’s something we might look at for the upcoming season.
EGR: You call yourself the “first and only NFL daily fantasy in the UK”. Given how big DFS is in the US, why do you think UK fans have been slow to get behind the vertical?
GS: I’ve thought about that for a few years actually. In the US, fantasy sports are considered games of skill, so you don’t need a gambling licence to operate DFS. That made it a lot easier for companies to start up and a lot easier for people to play because, historically, gambling has not been readily available.
Obviously, things are changing now. Another aspect is that American sports lend themselves so well to fantasy sports. RedZone, for example, is literally geared towards showing hours of NFL games with fantasy scoring in mind, and that’s why it’s not as popular here in the UK.
Historically, we’ve had bookmakers with a culture of sports betting geared towards accumulators and all those sorts of things. There’s a lot less DFS in the UK and that’s why we’re here – we want to disrupt that. We don’t want to be a bookmaker, we’re not a bookmaker, and we want it to be more social, playing against friends or other fans. That’s a newer concept and hopefully one that in a few years people will look back on and think: ‘Yeah, it’s now becoming really popular’, just like it is in the US.
EGR: The NFL is growing not only in the UK but also in Spain and Germany in 2025. Do you have any plans to expand into those markets?
GS: Much like I get asked a lot about other sports, we get asked a lot about whether we will be going to Europe or, in particular, Ireland. In short, no. We’re only licensed to operate in the UK and Northern Ireland. From a licensing point of view, we aren’t in Europe, and we won’t be. It might change down the line, but we are a UK-registered company paying tax in the UK. Honestly, we’re just starting out. We’ve got a lot of UK fans we want to introduce Fantasy Gameday to before we consider Europe.
EGR: With the NFL off-season being so long, are there plans to introduce other sports to the app?
GS: As of now, no, because we feel we’re still so new to the UK NFL fans and are getting more NFL fans to join us on this journey and play our games. There’s still so much more to do with the NFL and that’s why we created this business. Having said that, we know in the long term, and we get asked about other sports, we want our app to be operational 12 months of the year. But, at the moment, it is only operational between September and February.
The post Fantasy Gameday co-founder: Traffic surged 550% after DraftKings left the UK first appeared on EGR Intel.
Gurmeet Sahni discusses how the US DFS giant’s sudden exit from the market last October “massively altered” the startup’s strategy to cater to fantasy NFL aficionados seeking a new place to play
The post Fantasy Gameday co-founder: Traffic surged 550% after DraftKings left the UK first appeared on EGR Intel.