England’s most popular competition, the Premier League, takes a holiday between May and August each year. While this break sometimes grants space for international competitions, like the quadrennial World Cup and European Championships, there are still months without fixtures in the UK.

Rugby is the same. The 2024/25 campaign began in September and will run until June. Of course, athletes can’t keep playing all year round. The solution, at least for fans, is perhaps unexpected: say ‘hello’ to virtual sports.

Virtual Horse Racing

Virtual sports are simulated by a computer or something mechanical. It’s not too dissimilar – in terms of the base mechanics – from an online slot game. Betfair’s Slingo Constitution Hill is a good comparison, because it follows the same theme of horse racing. By matching coloured numbers on the gameboard – governed by an RNG – players can propel their horses to the finish line. It’s reminiscent of a game played in arcades at the British seaside, where putting a coin in a chosen horse’s slot starts the field racing towards the winning post.

Virtual sports leave space for experimentation and creativity. Constitution Hill is unique even among Slingo titles (Slingo is a melding of slots gameplay and bingo). The traditional ‘caller’ is replaced with a single numbered reel. Numbers on the bingo card are marked off whenever they come up on the reel.

Virtual horse races also have a playfulness to them: they take place on tracks like Nagsville and Neighmarket, a play on the Suffolk town of Newmarket. Fans can simulate flat, jumps, and sprint racing. Each event takes place every 2-3 minutes, and the winner is decided with a random number generator, as with casino games.

Virtual racing has only recently become more than a sideshow. The seaside horse-on-a-stick charging down a groove might have given people the wrong impression about virtual sports, as they’re increasingly realistic. Virtual horse racing tries to emulate TV footage, with camera angles, odds, different ways of betting (each way/win, etc.), and jockeys represented as a number and coloured jersey.


Virtual Football

Virtual sports and sport-themed slots tie into a trend in the industry, i.e. giving fans new ways to engage with their preferred athletes. Examples include social media, TV shows, and movies (e.g. Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016) and 2015’s Eddie the Eagle) but virtual sports extend that campaign to sports betting circles. The arrival of virtual football, featuring teams called Fiorentina Purples and Napoli Blues, changed the experience from a purely field-based game.

The European Journal of Sport Science confirmed in a 2021 paper that NBA basketball performance is affected by “schedule congestion”, a sentiment echoed by Premier League personnel like Pep Guardiola and Tottenham’s Heung-Min Son about their sport. In fact, Pep compared frantic Premier League seasons to the NBA when talking about Manchester City’s extensive injury list. While virtual sports won’t do much to ease superstars’ tired legs, they at least help fans avoid the twilight of the summer break.

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