A beautiful game

The Kernel’s deputy editor, David Rosenberg, peeks under the hood of Picklive, ‘the fastest fantasy football game in the world’.

Englishmen are rarely thought of as romantics. Perhaps it’s a hangover from the days of the stiff upper lip, or because to be a romantic is to begrudgingly admit that our cousins on the Continent are doing something right. Advertisers know this all too well. To sell man-products, they don’t play on an Englishman’s emotions: they stick to stereotyping the French and Australians, or to trivialising infidelity.

Tim Morgan isn’t English, he’s Welsh. My hour with him was nothing short of therapeutic. Morgan exudes an enthusiasm that is intoxicating and relieving. He is, I think, a romantic.

The flagship game from Morgan’s company, Picklive, is part fantasy football, part gambling. (The firm is regulated by the Gambling Commission.) It’s a compelling “second screen” product whose back-end spits out the fastest football stats on the planet. In other words, for a London start-up you might not have heard of, it brings a lot to the table.

The game is played concurrently with live football and involves picking five players during a 15 minute period of the game (or over the length of the match) who score points, based on their actions on the pitch. But breaking Picklive down in such mechanical terms is to miss the subtle genius of the product.

Every axle of Picklive is loaded with football lore. From rewarding players’ success with a better real-world manager as an avatar, to the on-screen messages like “Picking out the blue M&Ms for the WAGs” as you wait for the page to load, visually, Picklive is the creation of a team who have not only been watching football their whole lives but who have embraced, processed and understood English footballing culture.

In conversation, Morgan flits from musing on the failings of English sports journalists (“a focus on relegation and promotion excludes the real stories”) to proposing a grand unifying theory of investing in second-time entrepreneurs. Both arguments are sound.

Next, from the social implications of the abolition of terraces in stadiums (“it used to be that you stood with like-minded people”) to the virtues of the Government’s latest investment vehicle for start-ups (“everyone can be an angel”). And so on.

Morgan says he gets weird looks at dinner parties when he tells people he’s a serial start-up founder, but in Picklive, he has founded a company he and his team are naturally and uniquely placed to grow.

A few nights later, I play the game myself. I win £17 on a 15 minute game (my fee for this article, I’m later told). The final moments were exhilarating and the game provided a welcome complement to an otherwise fairly drab match.

But more noticeable than the gentle swelling of my bank balance was the chat box in the bottom corner of the Picklive screen. Immediately, it’s clear that Picklive’s users are hanging out as one might in a Sixth Form common room, ribbing each other like old pals do. They are happy to be there.

Morgan points out that the original version of Picklive wasn’t played for money: it was between friends. Its following has grown organically ever since. On the night I observed his team tracking the in-game data, Morgan was sat at his laptop, responding to users’ comments and stirring debate.

If Fred Wilson is right with his “network of engaged users” investment thesis, Picklive would seem primed to prosper.

That said, all this human input is what currently stands between Picklive and the larger scale a product of its sophistication deserves. Every match they offer for gaming purposes must be televised in the UK, and it takes a team of five paid humans to produce the stats that power Picklive’s gaming engine.

This means Picklive can’t, as one assumes they must want to, offer every game from every domestic football league from here to Buenos Aires.

I don’t think Morgan is too worried about that at the moment. He and the team are already cooking up more games that can furnish them with regular revenue. No doubt whatever they do next will make good use of their ability to tap into our nation’s sub-conscious, as they have football fans’ with Picklive.

And clearly there is a high demand for products such as theirs. Only last week, BSkyB purchased a 10 per cent stake in second-screen app Zeebox, just two months after it launched to the public.

And when you consider the $5 billion US fantasy sports market, the team at Picklive are certainly not short of opportunities.