A Note From Our Founder

Dear Fantasy Managers,

In 2022, myself and my co-founder Jimmy were like many of you, new fans to women’s football. As someone who’d watched men’s football my whole life, and where fantasy football had been a part of my fan experience for almost a decade, I saw how helpful a game could be to introduce myself to the WSL, its clubs, and its players. 

Jimmy built the game, the website, and the app, while I designed and marketed it. We did this in our evenings, weekends, and Christmas breaks with one goal: to gamify the process of becoming a fan of the WSL. That was the hope, but we couldn’t have predicted what came next. In 2023, our first proper season, we grew from 158 players to just over 10,000 by the time the league kicked off that October. That number just kept growing until we finished that season with 32,000 fantasy managers.

To say we were blown away was an understatement. I’ll be honest, there was no plan at first, we were mainly focused on improving the game, making it the best it could be to give you all the best experience possible. But with the speed of growth we experienced, it quickly became clear to us that women’s football fans have been massively underserved. We aren’t a massive agency backed by investors or owned by a conglomerate, we’re just two fans who happened to be a software engineer and a digital marketer, who could pour their own savings into a dream of, ‘hey, maybe one day we could also be like FPL,’ a fan founded game before the Premier League worked with them on growing it to what it is today.

And that’s when Even Sports was born. Our small independent company with the sole focus of supporting the growth of women’s sports and smaller emerging leagues. Since 2022, we’ve run games following the WSL, NWSL, and we even did our first tournament game for the Euros last year. All the while learning valuable lessons on what makes fantasy football fun and engaging for this fandom.

Support for our game has come from many angles, and we’ve had many conversations on how to work towards being an official game. However, these discussions have not ended in any form of agreement, and it's become clear that there will no longer be room for us to carry on in this space.

And so, we’ve made the tough decision that we will not be coming back for the 26/27 WSL season. This current season will be the last of Aerial Fantasy or a WSL dedicated Even Sports game.

Of course, the team and I are gutted. We genuinely love this game and this community. However, after putting in all the time and effort to make it exist, we realised it also needed to sustain itself financially. Our savings were only going to take us so far, and the bigger we grew the more expensive it became to run. In our years of trying to make this sustainable, we’ve also found that brands have been hesitant to work with an unofficial game, giving us even less options.

It’s never sat right with me personally how much hard work it is to be a fan of women’s football, or how much of it gets treated like a charity when it delivers great value and should be treated as such. We’ve been lucky that there have been so many kind and generous fans who have offered to donate to us to help in the running of the game, and while we appreciate that so much, we’ve always been keen to make sure we could stand as a viable business.

I know that the industry is still in its infancy and things will get better as we continue to invest, but it bothers me how so much in men’s football is a given and in women’s football a lot is still a question. I wanted our fantasy game to be a given. No matter if you’ve been a fan for 1 year or 10 years, I wanted this game to be a fun experience to bring you closer to the league and to one another, without any barriers of cost or quality.

I also know we've never been perfect. There were moments the game glitched or fell over — a natural consequence of running lean and building as cost-effectively as possible. But still, we always appreciate your patience, all the feedback and support you’ve given us while we improved the game, whether that be bugs, new features, or new ways of scoring. You have all been so passionate, so dedicated. This community has been a dream to build for.

At the start, we had the opportunity and the ability to make our game, but sadly it’s become clear we cannot continue without splitting the audience, and undermining our ultimate goal, the growth of women’s football. While we would have loved to continue, now is the time for us to bow out.Since we started this game, we’ve had over 80,000 fans sign up to play a fantasy game dedicated to one of the best leagues in all of football. We believe that someone had to do it, to make it exist, to bring it this far, and to prove that we want it. I’m so proud that we got to be the ones who took it this far. All of us together.

While this is the end of Aerial Fantasy, this isn’t the end of Even Sports and our fantasy football games. We’ve just kicked off the second season of our unofficial NWSL game, and we have exciting plans for what will take the place of the current Aerial Fantasy app. But, you’ll hear about that soon.

And, of course, the current game will continue until the end of the 2025/26 season!

Thank you so much for being supportive of us, of the game, and of letting me tweet more gifs than I’ve ever tweeted in my life. I know this game isn’t about me, but it has meant so much and it’s been the biggest honour to see what it’s meant to you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Dani x