As the new American Football season gets under way, ESPN's Fantasy Football application has now worked through its exclusivity period with Nokia, and is generally available to all Windows Phone handsets.

Previously the Fantasy Football was a Nokia exclusive app, and was one of the apps used to push the Lumia range to the US market over and above offerings from Samsung and HTC. That exclusive period has now come to an end, and this client app is now available across the full Windows Phone range, for WP8 and WP7 devices.

The application works alongside your game account on ESPN's Fantasy Football League, which runs one of the largest and most popular Fantasy Football Leagues (at least for American Football). Managing your team, reacting to changes, and keeping up with the news that could have an impact on your score in the next games is all part of the challenge in maximising your team and scoring highly.

The main features of the app are:

• Team Management: start/bench players, add, drop, and claim players off waivers, propose, accept, or reject trades with other team owners in your league.
• FantasyCast Live Scoring: receive real-time player and matchup scoring updates.
• Fantasy News, Videos, and Tweets from ESPN fantasy analysts.
• View and post messages to your league's message board.

While it's unlikely that anyone is going to specifically buy a Windows Phone to get a hold of the ESPN Fantasy Football app - it's already available for iOS and Android. What is more likely is that having the same app and functionality on Windows Phone reduces the switching cost of a Fantasy'er, removing one barrier to them buying a handset. And with every barrier that comes down, the decision to serious look, and then buy, a Windows Phone handset, is a little easier to make.

Download your copy from the AAWP App Directory now.