Last minute checks on teams could have wasted even longer on sports sites

Almost half the time spent on fantasy football websites before the new season kicked off was during office hours, according to an industry analyst.

Internet monitoring firm comScore said that 47.9 per cent of all time spent on the Fantasy Football sites it monitored was during office hours, reaching a total of 230,000 hours on the Friday before the first games.

Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets at comScore, said the proportion of time being spent on these sites during office hours is significant.

"On the Friday before the start of the Premiership season alone, over 230,000 office hours were spent on the fantasy football sites analysed in this study," he said.

"Obviously, you would expect the actual amount of time being spent on these sites to level off over the course of the season, but it will be very interesting to see if the office share of total time spent remains the same."

Ivins said a lot of attention had been drawn recently to the impact that social networking sites are having on the working day, but these figures showed they were not the only sector taking up office time.

The study by comScore followed eight fantasy football sites, with Barclays Fantasy Premier League being the most popular with 1.36 million unique visitors in August.

The Sun's Dreamteam website came second with 1.13 million unique users, Fantasy League was third with 858,000 users and The Telegraph came fourth with 189,000.

Statements from Andrew Wainstein, managing director of Premierleague.com, po inted to even further wasted staff time as fantasy fans may have been browsing other sports sites to do last minute checks on the available players.

"The huge upsurge in traffic to these sites in August is an indication of fans waiting as long as possible to pick their team, so they can get as clear an idea as possible of the summer transfers," he said.

"The immediacy of the online world facilitates this need extremely well.”