How the First-Ever Fantasy Climbing League Platform Aims to Change the Game

Two Swedish brothers just launched a new fantasy climbing league platform, allowing fans around the world to heighten the stakes of their climbing competition viewing. While fantasy leagues have long been popular in sports like football and basketball, this marks the first platform for assembling an imaginary team of climbers to watch throughout a competition season. So how did this idea take root—and how could it change competition climbing fanhood?

It all started a few years ago, when climbing brothers Emil and Felix Abrahamsson put together a homespun fantasy climbing league with eight or nine friends. The group kept track of their athlete picks using Excel spreadsheets, then got together for World Cups to watch those picks play out. Most of the group had watched past World Climbing competitions. But now, they were all in—debriefing every round, feeling the weight of each move, putting faces to new names.

“Everybody just got really invested in the different athletes—who they were, where they were coming from, how they performed, the underdogs, the top dogs,” says Emil, who competed for Sweden on World Climbing’s European and international circuits from 2020 to 2023. “It made us cheer for a lot of the athletes in a way that we might not have otherwise.”

Emil sees climbing as a natural choice for fantasy gameplay, with its dark-horse wins, beta breaks, gasp-inducing slips, and routesetting curveballs (like that vexing, clear no-tex hold used at the 2023 Bern World Championships). “You can have these people who aren’t technically ‘the best’—they don’t win every single comp, they’re not always at the top of the podium—who out of nowhere can get into finals,” he told me. “It’s one of the things that makes the sport so special.”

This year, Emil and Felix found a way to extend the enhanced viewing experience of their informal fantasy league to more climbing fans. Harnessing Felix’s background as a machine learning engineer and Emil’s YouTube content creation skills, they created a free platform: the Fantasy Climbing League. The platform went live on April 22, with members following the first bouldering World Cup of the 2026 World Climbing season this past weekend in Keqiao, China.

As this novel league kicks into gear, I wonder whether it will exhibit the same buzzy energy and sociocultural patterns prominent in existing fantasy league culture. U.S. fantasy football culture, for example, often involves fall drafts held at sports bars and boisterous group text threads. But there’s also a darker side to the hobby. Positioning players as chess pieces can lead to squabbles over lost points or, more disturbingly, online harassment of athletes. And when gambling raises the stakes for fantasy leagues, it only adds fuel to the fire. This may never be an issue for competition climbing, a far more niche sport than NFL football. But how can leagues proceed with caution to take the good without the bad from fantasy sports?

How does the Fantasy Climbing League work?

The Fantasy Climbing League hosts public and private leagues for six categories of the World Climbing (formerly known as IFSC) circuit: women’s and men’s bouldering, lead, and speed.

Public Fantasy Climbing Leagues

In the public leagues, users create teams of up to eight athletes using a credit system. With a budget of 1,000 credits, users select athletes assigned different credit values based primarily on past performances at World Climbing events. As World Cups unfold throughout the year, users can see how their assembled teams stack up against thousands of others worldwide and modify their rosters between competitions.

The Abrahamsson brothers designed the public league credit system in order to motivate fantasy players to balance their go-to, top-ranked picks with athletes whom they may have never heard of.

For this past weekend’s opening bouldering event, for instance, 2025 overall bouldering world title holders Oriane Bertone and Soratu Anraku made for costly additions to a team. Unsurprisingly, selecting Janja Garnbret also set users back 245 credits, the highest value for women’s bouldering picks. But the Keqiao World Cup demonstrated how things can get interesting: Garnbret took silver, edged out in finals by 22-year-old French climber Zélia Avezou—whose win marked her first-ever World Cup bouldering gold.

World Cup events for the three disciplines of competition climbing are staggered in their starts for the season. This shapes the timing of fantasy team building. Since bouldering kicked off on May 1, public leagues no longer accept new additions. But public lead leagues are now open and speed leagues will open in the next day or two. Both leagues will remain open until just before the first lead and speed World Cups take place this weekend, May 8 to 10. (Users have until May 7 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time to join a public lead or speed league.)

Private Fantasy Climbing Leagues

Users can also form their own private leagues for the year’s remaining bouldering, lead, and speed World Cup competitions at any time. Private leagues, which Emil is very excited about, come closer to his early, insular fantasy climbing experiences with his friends. Groups run their own leagues and play with customized team size limits and credit budgets. Emil and Felix also added a tier system as a team selection method to these leagues. The tier system brackets athletes into a couple of tiers based on World Climbing rankings. This simplifies athlete selection for users less interested in puzzling out a set of budgeted credits.

Dodging the “devil’s bargain” of high-stakes fantasy sports

Emil hopes that as climbing fantasy leagues form, fans—especially new climbers—will engage more with the sport on their own initiative. “They see all of these names, and they get involved by looking at the Asian Championships and the scores there,” he explains of how he anticipates fans will research their teams. “They see that Toby Roberts won the Olympic finals, and they hop onto his Instagram to find out what he’s doing now. That kind of stuff is what I’d love to see people get more involved with. The league helps them direct their focus to the athletes and give them the love they deserve.”

How pro climbers are reacting

U.K. pro climber Shauna Coxsey can picture that effect. A two-time bouldering World Cup winner, Coxsey retired from competition in the World Climbing circuit following the 2021 Olympics (though she made a quick foray back into comps this spring). She told Climbing that a league might help get more fans invested in watching the action and supporting their favorite climbers. “Having someone like Emil behind this means that it is in good hands,” Coxsey said. ”He cares deeply about climbing and the community, so it will be exciting to see how it goes.”

When the Abrahamsson brothers chatted about the Fantasy Climbing League on a recent episode of the podcast “That’s Not Real Climbing,” host Jinni Xia jumped into the tricky side of added fan investment. Namely, that fans can become too invested for reasons other than a love of the game, e.g., when they have money on the line. The three didn’t linger long on the subject, but it left me curious. Though I have little fantasy sports experience myself—just one season of a very neglected Fantasy Football lineup to my name—I wondered: Just how entangled have fantasy sports and gambling become?

Could sports gambling emerge in fantasy climbing?

In the 2024 Atlantic article “The Devil’s Bargain of Sports Betting,” Kevin Townsend explored this issue. In the piece, sports journalist Jemele Hill describes gambling in U.S. sports as a future “public health crisis.” And its “gateway drug”? Fantasy football. “Every week, [fantasy football is] teaching you how to individualize player performance in a way that is not necessarily always healthy, when you’re screaming about why Davante Adams doesn’t get you another catch or 10 more yards or another touchdown so you can win your fantasy game,” Hill told The Atlantic.

While statistics about this “public health crisis” remain limited, a recent study detailed by Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center adds some insight into the issue. The Prosper Media Behavior and Influence (MBI) study confirmed the increasing crossover between fantasy sports and sports gambling. In the 2023 survey, 83 percent of respondents who reported that they played fantasy sports revealed that they also partook in sports gambling.

Emil, who isn’t much of a gambler himself, admits that he hadn’t really thought about money getting thrown around in worrisome ways among the platform’s leagues until after he and Felix had developed it. “I’m a stupidly optimistic kind of person, like a little golden retriever,” Emil says. “And then some people brought up the gambling thing, and I was like, ‘Yes. That’s a fair point.’ Gambling could become a big problem with a fantasy league.”

Fantasy sports operate as a form of “disguised gambling,” according to Hill. It’s standard practice to throw 10 or 20 bucks into a winner’s pot at a season’s outset. But league members can choose to raise the stakes or use league platforms with big built-in prize pots. They can also make a lateral move into sports betting, an industry that’s exploded in recent years. In the U.S., after the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban on sports betting in 2018, the industry became legal in 39 states, reaching a record $16.96 billion in revenue last year.

The modes of betting are now evolving and expanding globally, with sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings enabling users to make “microbets” on individual moments of live games—on shots, serves, and passes, for example.

Meanwhile, prediction markets also encompass sports and experts project they will grow into a trillion-dollar sector by 2030. On Polymarket, one of the world’s largest prediction markets, users could bet on the outcome of Alex Honnold’s free solo of Taipei 101 in January. Sportsbooks have even dipped directly into fantasy sports with “daily fantasy sports,” which accelerate gameplay, charge entry fees to members of huge leagues, and offer million-dollar prize pools.

How the fantasy climbing league creators plan to avoid betting

Big sportsbooks won’t likely wade heavily into a sport as niche as competition climbing anytime soon. And Emil definitely doesn’t plan to integrate gambling features into the Fantasy Climbing League platform. He knows he can’t totally control what happens among private leagues, but if gambling were to visibly escalate on the platform, he and Felix plan to take swift action. That might mean closing private leagues if they were to swell up to the thousands, or if any members organized a massive prize pool elsewhere online. “It’s a field I’d like to do more research on, to understand what we can do to prevent issues,” Emil says.

For now, he’s taking a wait-and-see approach. The Abrahamsson brothers consider the 2026 season a test that Emil says is “still very much in an experimental phase.” They’re bracing for server impact and bugs during World Cups, with thousands of members already signed up. The feedback has been positive so far, but Emil wants more of it from both fans and competition climbers to prevent any “toxicity” from seeping into the fantasy league experience.

“If athletes end up just becoming points on your scoreboard, then we’ve definitely failed,” Emil says. “Everybody who voted for them, I want them to have done some research on why they voted for them. If it’s made people committed and invested in that athlete, then we’ve succeeded.”

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