This February in Boston, shortly after sunrise every Sunday morning, Cadrin Msumba will go to Catholic Mass. Although Msumba, 28, does not identify as religious, he will attend 10 early-morning worship services, one for every week that he came in last in his fantasy football league.
Msumba chose this fate over other ideas: a spice tolerance challenge, an extreme workout regimen or dying his hair blond. All three options were better than the punishment he faced his senior year of college. “I came in last and had to get taped to a tree for a couple hours,” he recalled, sounding nostalgic.
In the following weeks, if you see a haggard-looking diner vlogging at 2 a.m. from a pancake house, or a besuited man sharing a restaurant booth with a blowup doll, or a Gen Xer taking the SAT, they are most likely stoic recipients of fantasy football league punishments.
More than 50 million people in North America participate in fantasy sports, in which participants draft dream teams of real athletes, then rise or fall in their league’s rankings based on those players’ performance. And many invest in a league punishment — typically something inexpensive and relatively low-stakes that the last-place participant has to complete.
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While plenty of women participate (they make up about 28 percent of all players, according to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association), the leagues have taken on increasing significance for many men. Amid a purported male loneliness epidemic, fantasy football can be a rare source of camaraderie and social contact.
“Men generally aren’t just like, ‘Hey, man, let’s talk. How are you feeling?’” said Matthew Berry, a fantasy football analyst and creator of the site Fantasy Life. “Being able to talk trash about one another, offering trades, you know, commenting on their league, making fun of people that are in last place, complaining about whoever’s in first, it’s easy for guys to do that. It’s an — excuse is the wrong word — but it’s a mechanism, if you will, for men to communicate and bond with each other.”
Punishments are relatively new to fantasy sports, popularized in part by the TV show “The League” and by sports reporting like Berry’s 2013 book “Fantasy Life,” which highlighted leagues with punishments as extreme as a permanent tattoo for the loser. Common punishments include wearing a dress, a tutu or makeup in public. Olympic speedskating medalist and fantasy league loser Casey Dawson will attend the upcoming Winter Games clutching a sparkly pink backpack covered in hearts. A punishment that fans often toss around is to force the league’s loser to attend a WNBA game.
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“It’s a lot of fun to be able to make fun of somebody and it not have to be hinging upon, ‘I’m going to make fun of you because of the way you look, or your job or your social status or anything like that,” said Kris Kem, a 45-year-old whose Houston-based league is turning 10 this year. “It’s complete innocent ribbing.”
Men are more likely than women to report feeling disconnected and not part of any community, and a quarter of young American men report feeling lonely. Fantasy leagues, meanwhile, invite constant participation in group texts, watch parties and punishments. Punishments address a flaw in fantasy sports: Participation can drop off as it becomes apparent which league members will not make the playoffs.
“The guys who are at the bottom of the barrel — it keeps them interested in the league,” said Brandon Thomas, 32, a member of a fantasy league in Salt Lake City. “We have quite the pool of money that goes to the guy who wins the championship, but we look forward more to the punishment.” In the spring, Thomas’s fantasy league plans to take over a karaoke bar for an evening so that the league’s loser can perform 11 songs chosen by the rest of the participants.
“This league chat that we have is how we wish everyone a happy birthday,” said Kem, whose league includes 10 men and two women. “It is how we organize our Friendsgiving. It’s how we plan events with our kids.” Without the structure of the fantasy season, he said, “we would certainly not be checking in on each other as much. We would most likely have drifted apart over the past several years.”
Fantasy football punishments and payouts also stand in stark contrast to the isolation and financial risk of online sports gambling, which has exploded since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited sports betting in 2018.
The difference, Msumba said, is that “fantasy football requires a little bit more skill [and] a lot more luck of circumstances but ultimately yields a higher dopamine of gratification when you win.” Winning fantasy “is like an insanely long parlay win,” whereas regular sports gambling “is more like a quick fix,” he said. Instead of a jovial ritual embarrassment, the “punishment” for losing sports bets ranges from financial loss to personal devastation.
Mobile sports betting can have a social component — friends can chat about and “tail” each other’s bets. But a season of fantasy sports, said Jared Martin, a 29-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, comes with “the group chats, the trades, the draft day, the scoreboard watching,” all of which encourage participants to keep in touch, regardless of distance. Dominant online sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings offer a version of fantasy sports without those components, so the participant is just an individual interfacing with an app or website.
Some fantasy leagues enforce smaller punishments throughout the season, so that each week’s loser has to complete a challenge. Other leagues deliberately schedule their punishment after the football season.
Kem’s league likes to spin a punishment out into numerous group outings. “It allows us to continue to interact in a very casual and silly way after the season ends, and kind of, you know, gives us an excuse to find ways to hang out with each other,” he said. One memorable year, the competitors rallied for multiple group meals out to torture the loser, who had been forced into a week of veganism. They sent him recipes for tofu brisket. When the week ended, the group celebrated with a night at a steakhouse.
Sensational and public punishments have escalated with the help of social media, where viral videos elicit schadenfreude on behalf of the loser and bring glorious infamy to the rest of the league. (Msumba refused his league’s request to make TikToks of himself walking into morning Mass; he’ll send the video evidence to his group instead.)
The best punishment, Berry said, is “kind of this crazy, humiliating moment, but it’s like it now provides memories and inside jokes for years.” Since the entire group commits to potentially carrying it out, “It’s always important that the level of humiliation is to the comfort level of the most squeamish person in the league,” he said. To that end, Thomas’s team ultimately declined to institute a punishment involving open-identity sperm donation. “As a whole, we’re not bad people,” he said. “We’re good human beings, we just are degenerates when it comes to sports.”
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But there’s a sweetness to some punishments. Martin is a member of four fantasy football leagues, including one at the hospital where he is in the first year of a medical residency. The residents have little time to spare, but the league’s winner is hoping to make the loser run a lemonade stand in the dead of winter, and donate the earnings to a charitable cause.
As the fantasy football season wraps up, punishments give players something to look forward to. It’s hard to feel isolated when you’re trying to rally numerous friends to attend an 11-song karaoke set starring a league loser who is no better at singing than he is at fantasy football.
“It’s been one of the best things I’ve probably done with my life, is fantasy football,” said Thomas, who is planning the karaoke night. “Which is weird to say because it’s silly, online, football-watching nonsense.”
When the karaoke night comes, he plans to jump onstage and join the loser in a duet.
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