The Fan-Controlled Football League (FCFL), a new football league that lets fans call the shots on game plays, announced a multiyear streaming deal with Twitch this week.
The deal makes Twitch the exclusive broadcaster of the FCFL through its 2019 and 2020 seasons.
The FCFL, which is an interactive football league that combines the control of the Madden video game with the physicality of professional football, will allow fans to download an extension in Twitch to watch the game and vote on what play the offense or defense should run. The play-calls are then sent to the quarterback and executed in real time on the field. Prior to the season, fans will also be able to vote on their teams’ names, coaches and rosters.
This is the second year the FCFL has partnered with Twitch. It first began using the service near the end of its inaugural season in 2017.
“It was amazing what an experience it was for the Twitch viewers,” Jason Chilton, the Head of Football Experience at FANchise, FCFL’s parent company, said last month on a panel at SXSW. “We integrated it so you could call plays through the Twitch app itself.”
Chilton said the Twitch deal is a great example of what he thinks is going to be a big wave of the future: “embedding interactivity into your streaming sports experience.”
This season, the format of the games will be similar to the indoor Arena Football League (AFL), which the FCFL was initially born out of. Games will be seven-on-seven with 50-yard fields and will last an hour. FCFL isn’t quite a videogame like Madden but it’s also not quite professional football — it’s somewhere in the middle, and the league is often referred to as “real-life Madden”.
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To call plays and have meaningful votes, fans will need to invest in and spend FAN Tokens, the in-app currency of the FCFL that’s powered by blockchain technology. The FAN Token is technically a cryptocurrency, but the company stresses that users “won’t have to know anything about cryptocurrency to easily and safely manage their FAN Tokens.” The company believes an in-app currency will prevent people from abusing the system.
SportTechie Takeaway:
Twitch, the social video streaming service operated by Amazon, has long been a hub for the esports community. Recently the service started streaming traditional sports, such as the NBA’s G League and NFL Thursday Night Football games. The addition of the FCFL, which as we said earlier can be likened to real-world Madden, seems like a natural fit for an interactive league that can draw in crowds from both gaming and traditional sports and use the interactive features of Twitch to enhance fan engagement.