Yahoo’s new fantasy sports app is for the true diehards

Yahoo is a giant in the world of fantasy sports, but its app hasn’t gotten a meaningful update in years. Ahead of the 2024 NFL season, though, the company is rolling out a completely overhauled version of the Yahoo Fantasy Sports app that brings both a cleaner design and a huge amount of new content for fantasy players.

The new app is divided into three sections. The first thing that appears when you open the app is a list of all your fantasy teams across sports — football is by far the most popular, but Yahoo also offers fantasy baseball, basketball, and more, and part of the team’s goal with the new app is to get you playing new fantasy games. There’s also a News tab with dedicated content for fantasy players and a Scores tab that shows all the scores you and your fantasy teams care about. Before, all that content lived separately in the Yahoo Sports app, but now it’s right next to your fantasy games.

As for the nuts and bolts of playing fantasy, not much has changed. Yahoo cleaned up the app’s design so you can see your whole team on the screen at once and more easily switch between teams. With new logos and icons, you can also customize your team, but the app should feel familiar to anyone who’s used it before. Old as the app is, Yahoo Sports president Ryan Spoon says it’s still a huge success. This was not intended to be a full reboot, just an improvement.

The overall idea behind the new app, Spoon tells me, is to make it a more complete experience for fans. “When I wake up on Sunday,” he says, “give me the news. Let me change my team. And during the game, let me watch my team or watch the box score.” Previously, that process required two or three different apps; Yahoo now hopes you’ll do it all in one place.

One nice thing about building a fantasy football app, Spoon says, is that you kind of know exactly how people are going to use it. “Tuesday morning is, ‘tell me what happened in the week, and set up the waiver wire,’” Spoon says. “Wednesday is waiver wire.” Thursday night through Monday night, it’s all lineup tinkering and a million check-ins a day to see how your team is doing. Rinse and repeat, 14 or so weeks a year. 

Yahoo is chipping away at improving each part of that process, including an eventual redesign of the desktop web app, but Spoon says mobile is the center of the experience. “85 percent of our users used the mobile app last year,” he says, “and over two-thirds of them used it every day. The usage is really high.” 

Since Spoon joined Yahoo from ESPN about a year ago, he’s been adding new content and features to the whole Yahoo Sports platform. As football kicks off this year, there’ll be more fantasy-related news, more fantasy-related shows, and more fantasy-related everything. Through all of its many ups and downs as a company, Yahoo has somehow remained one of the most important fantasy platforms — and that seems to be the centerpiece of everything Yahoo wants to do next.