Soccer is truly a sport with global appeal, and a study from FIFA estimates that it is played by an astounding 265 million people around the world. The Football Association (FA), authorities of the game in the U.K., believes that 8.2 million people, the equivalent of more than one in ten, play the game in the country.
These figures show that soccer is thriving, especially the amateur and semi-professional game, with an estimated 24 million clubs boasting more than 270 million players worldwide. Due to the huge popularity of not only soccer globally, but more specifically the amateur side of the sport, Footters, an online streaming platform, is trying to get in on the ground floor by broadcasting amateur games.
It is a streaming platform which amateur soccer clubs can sign up to for free and produce content for. The business model means that these clubs share revenue from paid subscribers and pay-per-view viewers on the platform.
It is a company that has the lofty goal of seeking to democratize world soccer by broadcasting teams that fans might be interested in, especially locally, but until now have had no chance to see on TV or more traditional broadcasting channels.
Javier Duro, chief marketing officer at the company said in an interview: “Our business model is around 300 million soccer players who are invisible around the world. They have no content online. They have no platform. And they need a pro platform.”
Four types of customers can sign up: soccer clubs, fans, players and coaches. For clubs, the opportunity is to create extra revenue by streaming these games to fans and maybe, along the way, picking up a few more interested supporters. However, for players and coaches, the offering is quite different. For players, their accounts are primarily to raise their profile among those on the platform, as it captures their statistics from games. Meanwhile for coaches, they can instead buy matches to study opponents’ tactics and teams, but they can also seek to raise their own profile too, much like players.
Last year, Footters signed a deal with IBM Cloud Video to help power Footters’ streaming platform, allowing it to be able to integrate live and recorded video feeds into a mobile app. Thanks to the partnership, it also gave the company the capability to offer individual clubs their own streaming channel offering either subscriptions or pay-per-view options to fans. Footters also wanted to take advantage of this product’s capabilities to measure results in real-time, thanks to the integration of cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Of this partnership, in a statement, Footters CEO Julio Fariñas Baro said: “IBM’s cognitive technology sets them apart and offers our platform features that can help extract data from a soccer game. For example, we plan to provide statistics such as how often a player has run up and down the wing, and how many times he has passed the ball.”
The company was founded by Fariñas Baro in September 2015, and the beta version of the platform went live in 2016. Based in Sevilla, Spain, the idea first took off after the company participated in a junior soccer tournament.
Footters most recently signed a prominent deal with ProLiga, the soccer body which represents clubs in the third-tier Segunda División B and fourth-tier Tercera División competitions in Spain. It gives up to 310 clubs in Spain the ability to set up their own online channels aided by Footters, which as part of the deal has joined the governing body’s ProLigaTV project. It will not broadcast live games but will instead show content such as interviews with players.
To date, the company already has a number of agreements in place including in the U.S., Mexico and Italy.
According to founder Fariñas Baro, in an interview with IBM, he measures the company’s success by how many federations it signs up and subscribers.
“We want to be a global football league,” he concluded.