Super Rugby Pacific is set to launch an official fantasy competition for the 2025 season.
It will be the first time the competition will launch its official product in association with the teams, players and player's associations.
Click here to register for 2025 Super Rugby Pacific Fantasy
Fans can register at https://www.playfantasyrugby.com/ to ensure they’re first in line when the game launches in January when further details around how to play and player prices will be revealed.
“I think more and more what we're seeing in global sport is gamification and second screen gamification becoming a really important part of fandom,” Super Rugby CEO Jack Mesley said.
“Providing mechanisms in which allow fans to go deeper, engage with their fans, with their friends around games is going to be a really important part of our product mix, particularly as we try to do a few things.
“Engage with a younger audience and making sure that we've got the tools and mechanisms that younger fans can engage with is going to be really important for Super going forward."
Mesley believes the introduction of Fantasy was crucial for the competition to attract a new group of fans and engagement whilst increasing the recognition of talent across the teams.
“It's going to really help us build the fame of players from other teams outside of the team that you support,” he believes.
“One of our focuses is to really promote this idea of we are one competition with 11 teams and we have 11 teams that represent all the different parts of the Pacific. What we want to do is make sure that a fan of the Waratahs knows the great talent that the Drua have or that exists with the Chiefs or the Force.
“The mechanics of Fantasy ensure you are going to look for great buys, great talent at good value for your Fantasy team across all 11 teams, which is going to help promote your engagement with the broader comp, not just the games and the squad of the team that you follow.
"... I think the more that the code can continue to push into this space to fuel gamification and mechanisms in which younger fans in particular can engage with the game, the better. Clearly that's easier to do around big tournaments like World Cups and things like that, but the more that that can happen at the club level, the better."
With that, comes greater transparency around the judiciary and injuries as they look to strike a balance according to Mesley.
"We certainly want to be more transparent and also have those regular beats throughout a week where you know you will get updates from the competition on these things," he added. "We've got to do that in a way that protects the integrity of some of those matters that are really important that we don't let the tail wag the dog, if you like, in terms of those things.
"We're working through that at the moment but I think everyone's really engaged about that regular flow of communication, about having more transparency and the balance is just making sure that that isn't getting in the way of great processes that sit behind the scenes.
"Super's got a fantastic judicial process that now World Rugby are looking at and looking at how to, you know, use that more widely. We've just got to make sure that we don't interrupt some of those really good processes that we have."
