Life

Nigel's billion dollar fantasy

Co Tyrone-born Nigel Eccles was never destined for life on the family farm. Having conquered America, the co-founder of billion dollar fantasy sports company FanDuel now has his sights set closer to home. He tells Joanne Sweeney about beating the Americans at their own games and his new plans for Premier League-based success

Nigel Eccles, Co Tyrone-born ceo of billion dollar valued fantasy sports company FanDuel
Nigel Eccles, Co Tyrone-born ceo of billion dollar valued fantasy sports company FanDuel Nigel Eccles, Co Tyrone-born ceo of billion dollar valued fantasy sports company FanDuel

NOTED ice hockey fanatic Michael Buble is already regular user and now former England striker turned TV football pundit Gary Lineker is in their sights.

FanDuel, one of the biggest names in America's lucrative world of web-based fantasy sports, has just launched in Britain and Ireland with a fantasy football game based on the new Premier League season which kicks off today.

Co Tyrone man Nigel Eccles is the co-founder of the company which has now attracted over six million players in North America, with paid users (free versions of their games are also available) vying to win prize pots of up to $2m.

Online fantasy sports – where users compete against each other by choosing virtual teams of real life players which accrue users points depending on their performances in each real fixture – are a multi-million dollar market in the US.

Seven years ago, Eccles and his four FanDuel co-founders had the audacity to take on the Americans at their own game when they launched their website in Edinburgh.

FanDuel catered for the four biggest US sports, American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey.

By last year, the company was valued at $1.3 billion.

Fantasy sports have become so entrenched in US popular culture that American sitcom The League, about friends who play in a fantasy football league, has been a hit show there for seven seasons.

We have not been immune to its charms either – remember Frank Skinner and David Baddiel's Fantasy Football League chat show in the 1990s? – and an estimated five million users here are already gaming away throughout every Premier League soccer season courtesy of various fantasy football apps.

Now, Eccles is betting on FanDuel taking a huge slice of this home market – particularly since online betting laws are less strict here compared to America.

While some media reports suggest that that Eccles' may already be one of the richest men in Northern Ireland, thanks to his company's mammoth valuation, he shrugs off the idea.

"Sadly this isn't true," he tells me over the phone from FanDuel's current New York HQ.

"The company has been valued at over $1 billion but that isn't personal wealth."

However, there's no denying that the boy has done good.

Eccles, a 41-year-old father of three whose wife, Lesley, is a co-founder and executive vice president in the company – is originally from a farming background outside Cookstown.

However, he says he was never really earmarked for a life on the land.

"My family has a dairy farm but sadly my father died while I was young so we were brought up by mum," he says.

"I have three older brothers and I think I made it clear very early on in life that farming wasn't for me.

"But I wouldn't say that entrepreneurship was on my mind at school or even leaving university. That definitely came later.

"I think some of my teachers at Cookstown High School would be surprised by my success, but maybe some of them wouldn't.

"I didn't do badly at school, I actually did quite well and did sciences for my A-Levels. But I didn't know I was going to become an entrepreneur when I was younger, so I would be surprised if anyone else thought it was going to happen."

His route to success was a well-trodden one; after going to university in St Andrew's in Scotland, where he met Lesley and several of the FanDuel co-founders, Eccles and his future wife headed off to London to find work as graduates.

His first job became a stroke of good fortune as it marked his entry into the world of betting and technology.

"I went to work for a tech startup in London which actually later became Betfair," he tells me.

"I also worked for Betdaq in Dublin for a year until the company was bought by Ladbrokes.

"Then I went to McKinsey (management consultants) and moved to Edinburgh and then launched the precursor to FanDuel in 2007.

"We had a background in a start-up for a pay money prediction game. We found that sports quickly became one of our biggest categories, so we decided to do a premium sports product since that what our players were naturally gravitating towards."

Rather than being intimidated by the US market, Eccles and his co-founders were inquisitive and undaunted.

"In retrospect, it was incredibly ambitious, if not maybe foolish," says Eccles.

"Here we were five Brits trying to revolutionise a market that we really didn't know a lot about – which was 3,500 miles away.

"A lot of people were very sceptical when we turned up in the first place, but I think what we brought was a fresh look to the market."

FanDuel's USP is flexibility, in that players don't have to stick with the same teams all season long.

"When we said things like 'why can't I join a league halfway through the season?', people would be like 'that's the dumbest thing ever', he recalls.

"But no-one ever asked that question before and as we were very new to it, we asked a lot of simple questions. I didn't think that the answers were good enough.

"Unlike the season long game, with FanDuel you can completely change your team every weekend or when there's a new game.

"You are not stuck with the same team or players all season long."

But the last seven years have not been all easy money: When asked how the company managed to navigate stringent gambling laws in the US (Eccles' says the word 'bet' is banned around FanDuel towers in NYC), he quips: "With the help of very good lawyers!"

While he's more of a strategist than a player – Eccles is currently hoping that his own virtual Premier League side will produce better results for him in the internal company league than their American football equivalents did – the Co Tyrone ceo is confident about the new FanDuel launch.

"Our company mission is about making sports more exciting," he says.

"We know from our experience in the US that we can do that. We think we can do that with British sport, firstly with Premier League and then with the Champions League."

And, with some major sports-loving celebrities among the millions of FanDuel players in North America, Eccles also hopes to net big name fans with the launch of their latest endeavour.

He says: "The singer Michael Buble is one our famous players who's already 'out there', and I know of a few others.

"Gary Lineker would be a dream player for the UK game."

:: To sign up to play FanDuel for the English Premier League on web or mobile, visit Fanduel.co.uk.