Fantasy football no longer belongs to the boys

Fantasy football draft season is here—and it’s no longer a boys’ club.

Of the 62.5 million people playing fantasy sports in the U.S. and Canada, 35% are women, according to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association’s 2023 survey. The trend is only growing: Women 35 and older visiting the Yahoo Fantasy app—the top-rated app for fantasy football—grew 61% year over year as of last month.

For the uninitiated, fantasy football lets players draft their own teams of real NFL athletes. Those teams compete in a league that runs alongside the NFL season. When your quarterback throws a touchdown or your running back racks up yards, your fantasy score goes up too. Draft days usually happen in late August or early September, just before the new season kicks off.

One all-female Yahoo Fantasy league, Tequila, Ta-Tas, and Tight Ends, held its draft at the Yahoo Fantasy Draft Weekend in Las Vegas August 22 to 24. The league was started by commissioner Samantha Metcalf, a lifelong Seattle Seahawks fan. “I avoided fantasy football for a while because I figured it would consume my life. And it has, but it’s been really fun,” Metcalf tells Fast Company. “I was able to find pretty easily 10 other women friends of mine that were enough into football that I figured they would have fun with it.”

Today, Metcalf’s Seattle-based league includes 12 women spanning different generations and backgrounds. “Everybody’s busy and I feel like sometimes, especially women, are so busy running a household and trying to do everything else, they think Where am I going to squeeze this in?” she says, noting, however, that once the league got going, the women were hooked.

They’re part of a broader movement of women getting into the game. A Yahoo Sports survey with DKC Analytics ahead of last season found that of the 22% of respondents who said they’d be playing fantasy football for the first time, half were women and nearly one in five were Gen Z. Yahoo Fantasy as a whole hit an all-time participation high in 2024, surpassing its previous peak in 2015.

The “Taylor Swift effect” may have had something to do with it. One in 10 people surveyed said they’d paid more attention to fantasy football since the singer struck up a high-profile romance with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. When it comes to assembling a team, 37% rate “drafting players who are dating my favorite celebrities or influencers” as a good or excellent draft strategy.

Still, most women join for the same reasons men do. “It’s the fun camaraderie between people,” Metcalf says. Then there’s the friendly competition and the social aspect.

Research backs that up. A study by the North American Society for Sports Management found that both men and women are motivated by enjoyment, engagement with the game, and social bonding.

Where women differ is they are also motivated by the desire to compete in a male-dominated arena. Metcalf says: “My husband actually asks me for advice on who he should draft and who he should play.”