Newsweek predicted that 2007 was going to be the year of the widget, but it looks like 2008 will be the year for sports widgets. ESPN released their Widget Center today and it looks very impressive, to say the least.

Immediately available to sports fans world wide are NCAAF, NCAAB, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and Nascar widgets that come in the following types: Teams, Players, Spotlight, Standings, Rankings, Scoreboard, and Polls. There are custom widgets that deliver up to the minute stories and scores for every single team and player. This means there are a few thousand widgets available, yes thousands!

ESPN Widgets are portable applications that you can place almost anywhere! You can put them on your blog, your iGoogle home page, your Facebook profile, and many of the other most popular sites on the internet. These ESPN Widgets are updated frequently, so you can keep up-to-date with breaking stories and the latest scores and stats. Add an ESPN Widget to your favorite site today!

Considering that there was a recent report by Fastcompany about how ESPN.com is losing the battle to Yahoo Sports, this is a great strategic move by ESPN. These Widgets will surely drive a significant amount of traffic back to ESPN and put some pressure on Yahoo Sports to come out with their own suite of widgets. You can expect to see these widgets all over Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, and Hi5 very soon.

Where are the Yahoo Sports widgets by the way? Check out what’s currently available, bleh! Fantasy sports players would love to have a widget that will display their current rosters, league updates, breaking news that is tailored to their fantasy teams. Surely Yahoo has got to be up to something in this space.

ESPN’s widget strategy is so elaborate and deep that I think it will open a lot of eyes in terms of what is possible. Companies such as Topps and Upper Deck will have to leverage widgets in order to revitalize the sports trading card industry. Sports trading widgets anybody? It probably is not far off, just remember where you heard it first.

The world of sports media we know it is changing right before our very eyes. With blogs, streaming video, satellite tv, p2p video, podcats, and widgets, sports fans definitely have a lot of ways to consume their sports information and entertainment. It is a good time to be a sports fan, let’s just leave it at that.

Check out all the different types of ESPN Widgets below:

Teams Widget

Players Widget

Top Story

Standings

Polls

Spotlight

Power Rankings

Scoreboard