After a 3 month summer break the English Premier League kicked off on Saturday, and last week Hitwise revealed that Liverpool FC’s official website was the most visited club website in the UK. With football fever back in full swing, more fans than ever are getting into the spirit by creating their own online fantasy teams. Searches for the term ‘fantasy football’ were up by 94% last week compared to the first week of the Premiership season last year.
UK Internet searches for ‘fantasy football’

As we mentioned earlier in the week, the official Fantasy Premier League site is the most popular fantasy football site in the UK, and over half of the people searching for ‘fantasy football’ end up there. The table below shows the top 10 websites in our Sports – Fantasy category. They are all football-related (the highest ranking non-football site was Telegraph Fantasy Cricket at number 11) and together they account for over three quarters of visits to the category. After Fantasy Premier League, the rest of the top 5 are all print newspaper sites.

Each newspaper has benefited from a boost in traffic to its online properties as a result of its fantasy football website. Last week, Mail Online – Fantasy League was the second most visited site before the Daily Mail’s main site (after Google UK), accounting for 11.66% of upstream traffic. The same was true for The Daily Telegraph and Metro, with 7.63% and 6.82% of their upstream traffic coming from their respective fantasy football websites.
The traffic went in both directions, and the largest destination for downstream traffic from each newspaper’s main site was its fantasy football page. 34.34% of traffic leaving Metro’s main site went to its fantasy football site, while for the Sun the figure was 14.15%. This was nearly 3 times the amount of traffic it sent to Page3.com, the largest recipient of downstream traffic from The Sun during the previous week.