"I give my wife dirty looks when she tells me something else is happening on a Sunday," said Howarth, 31, who works for a public relations company in Boston.

He's among 13 million playing fantasy football this season, a million more than last year, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. News Corp's Fox and Viacom's CBS networks are broadcasting programs about the pastime, hoping to hook fantasy players who watch almost twice as much football on TV and spend more time on the Internet than average fans.

ADVERTISEMENT

"You couldn't have cooked up a better idea to keep your die-hards engaged," said market strategist Jack Trout. "It's all part of `How do you get fans interested and how do you attract new fans?' Fantasy football has become an answer to both questions."

To play, people select NFL players and compare their touchdowns, yardage and other statistics each week to determine who wins games. At the end of the season the league winner usually gets a cash prize contributed by the other owners. Leagues pay Internet sites - US$150 million (HK$1.17 billion) this year, according to the trade association - to keep score.

"Fantasy leagues used to be a lot smaller when it was just a few friends getting together," said former NBC Sports vice president Mike Trager. "Now that they have become more sophisticated and easy to enter, it has exploded."

The game has grown big enough for CBS and Fox to air hour-long shows last month devoted to helping fantasy team owners pick the best players.

"Every year the interest in fantasy football has gone up," said Tony Petitti, executive producer of CBS Sports.

The NFL season, which started with the defending Super Bowl champion New England Patriots beating the Oakland Raiders 30-20, has the 47-year-old Dino Rizzo spending two hours a day pouring over articles on ESPN.com and CBS Sportsline.com.

Rizzo, an accountant, said he belongs to two leagues and is considering joining a third. He spends about US$230 each year on fantasy football, including US$29 for an online service that purports to give more in-depth player analysis.

"It gets competitive juices flowing," said Rizzo, who has won his league twice in the past five years.

The NFL estimates that fantasy players watch an average of 7.1 hours of football a week, or three more hours than other fans. Fantasy sports players view 219 Web pages a month, more than twice as much as the average sports fan, according to a 2004 report by comScore Media Metrix, a company that tracks Internet traffic.

The average fantasy player is a 37-year-old male with an annual household income of almost US$80,000, said Greg Ambrosius, the president of the St Louis-based trade association. That's almost twice the median US household income of US$44,400, according to the US Census Bureau.

"There is a reason for the madness we are seeing right now," Ambrosius said. "It's appealing to a great demographic."

For fantasy players like Howarth, who pays US$249 to guarantee he has access to all 256 NFL games this season on his DirecTV Group satellite dish, and US$250 on league fees, the time he devotes to the game pays off. He won US$1,500 two years ago, which helped smooth things over with his wife.

"Initially, my wife wasn't very understanding," he said. "But after I won the first time, she has become a little more understanding."

BLOOMBERG