In a move designed to bring in more traffic to its own website, Sports Illustrated is teaming up with Citizen Sports, Inc. to provide a fantasy football league application to Facebook starting in July. SI has very rudimentary fantasy sports league features as part of their FanNation portion of the site. But SI has lagged behind the “big 3″ of fantasy sports leagues, news and analysis for some time, those players being Yahoo!, ESPN and CBS Sportsline. As their own executive states, it makes a lot of sense for SI to have fantasy football offerings on Facebook due to the fact there are millions of ready fantasy players available:

Ken Fuchs, vice president and general manager for SI Digital, Sports Illustrated’s online operation, says that rather than competing head to head with other sports sites to attract visitors, he wants to take his content to the places where sports fans already are. “We want people to come to our site, obviously,” Mr. Fuchs says. “But we recognize there’s an opportunity to reach people where they interact.”

SI hasn’t always been behind the curve, as their move to acquire FanNation a couple years ago proves. It is not a full-blown social network for sports, but it has some features for fan interaction and community involvement that the “Big 3″ have not yet tried.

Citizen Sports is best known as the parent company of ProTrade, where fantasy values of players are determined by the community which buy, sell and trade players in a simulated sports stock market. It’s clear Citizen Sports is intent on building more sports applications and social networks centered on sports, and make an appropriate partner for SI to make an impact on a social network like Facebook.

The SI fantasy football league application will launch in July, and we’ll provide you with a review when that happens. It will be interesting to see how the Facebook community takes to fantasy football leagues on the popular social network when it arrives this summer.