Yahoo Fantasy Sports updating game terminology and editorial language to be more inclusive

Effective today, Yahoo Fantasy will begin retiring a few familiar terms from our content and games, toward the goal of maintaining an inclusive platform. You'll find that gameplay at Yahoo will not change at all; we've simply eliminated language that suggests ownership or commodification of athletes. Fantasy managers will no longer buy players via auction, but will instead pay them via a salary cap draft. Drafting and managing your fantasy teams will remain fundamentally the same.

We haven't made our decisions about terminology in isolation, but rather in cooperation with other major fantasy providers and the NFL. Our industry is made up of companies of various sizes, all competing for people playing our games, but we're united by a desire to create and promote an inclusive community. At Yahoo, and alongside our partners, we're committed to developing platforms that are inviting and respectful to all.

You might be thinking these changes are so small and disassociated from everyday life as to be irrelevant — that we're just parsing the odd and arcane language of fantasy sports, a game about a game. But if you've made it here — to the third paragraph of a fantasy article that contains zero player information — then there's a decent chance our games-about-games have been a meaningful part of your sports experience. We simply want every aspect of those games to be hospitable to every community.

You can see the full list of changes to Yahoo Fantasy terminology, here.