These days, using Yahoo Fantasy Sports feels a lot like walking into Best Buy. It’s sort of depressing and a shell of its former self. Shelves are bare, most of the products inside are comically overpriced and there are more employees than customers. No matter how many good memories you have of the electronics store, those cannot change the sad reality of what it is now.
I still remember playing in my first Yahoo Fantasy Sports league back in 2005. It was a public baseball league and some of the managers stayed in contact using MSN Messenger. Just talking about it makes me nostalgic for the good ol’ days of the internet.
Anyway, Yahoo Fantasy Sports was by far and away the best fantasy sports platform up until 2020. The company opted to let Brad Evans leave in addition to some other fantasy staff. You didn’t think much of it at the time because Evans was the worst, but it was actually a sign of things to come.
Later in the year, Yahoo announced college fantasy football wouldn’t be coming back. Announce is a bit of an overstatement. They kept up all the college fantasy football content with a small blurb saying the game had been discontinued. These leagues can still be found online for some reason.
Cutbacks were part of Verizon’s preparation to sell the search engine company to Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, in 2021. As PE outfits are wont to do, cuts kept coming after the transaction while the product declined.
Fun features were removed. The Smack Talk chat in live drafts and league message boards were axed only to be replaced by absolutely nothing. Instead, the company continued to shove Yahoo Fantasy Plus down users’ throats despite no one wanting or asking for it. There is also constant shilling for paid best ball leagues and daily fantasy. It’s just like FanDuel or DraftKings only not as good.
Related: What happened to Yahoo Fantasy public league draft chats?
Nowhere is the demise of Yahoo Fantasy Sports more evident than its own marketing materials. The platform proudly brags about how it was named Best Fantasy Commissioner and Best Fantasy Sports App or Site by the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association on multiple occasions when trying to get you to sign up for its paid service.
However, that success ended in 2019. This is all the proof you need that Yahoo Fantasy Sports has jumped the shark. In its place is a platform that you remember fondly but just isn’t very good. Much like Best Buy stores in suburban America, they look the same as you remember. Unfortunately, they don’t quite feel the same.
Thanks, Apollo Global Management and corporate greed for ruining something else people love. You may have turned Yahoo Fantasy Sports into crap, but you’ll never be able to take away my memories of what was the best fantasy sports platform in the world for more than a decade. Here’s hoping you are forced to offload Yahoo at a loss.
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