After a week or two where the page for the official Dream Team competition on NRL.com carried a little message blaming lawyers for the product not being launched, they have now announced that they will be launching on March 20… AFTER round 1 has finished. This comes at a time when VirtualSports is still waiting on sponsors to sign on the dotted line for the AFL Dream Team competition, eight days before the season starts.
I am not surprised that sponsors are a little harder to find this year given the general economic climate, though one would have thought that Coke’s pockets would have been deep enough (suggesting that perhaps they’re not in the race this year). VirtualSports put the word out a month ago that this year’s AFL Dream Team prize pool was going to top $150,000, which means they would have to be asking a sponsor to fork out somewhere up to half a million smackeroos. I’m not blaming VS in any way, but they’re up against it this year to unearth that sort of coin.
Meanwhile, Herald-Sun Super Coach beat the official competition in raw growth terms and smashed it in percentage growth last year. Given that SC launched more than three weeks ago you’d have to think that it would get the jump in 2008. Could we see SC pass Dream Team in registrations? Every hour that DT is delayed, the likelihood of that happening grows.
Starting an official fantasy competition after the regular season has begun is a complete disaster. I know that NRL fantasy lags behind AFL in every metric, but that’s just pitiful. Let us hope that the AFL Dream Team competition does not suffer the same fate.
