Startup OneFootball hopes for European Championship
“For us, these are the most important four weeks”
14.06.2024, 15:03
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The German football platform OneFootball has been around since 2008. The startup of the same name attacked established providers such as “Kicker” or “Sport Bild” with an all-round service for fans. The app now has more than 100 million users, many of them outside Europe. But one project got OneFootball into trouble. Now the app is finally set to become profitable. In the podcast “Die Stunde Null” company boss Patrick Fischer talks about his plans.
When an event like the European Championship starts – is this the best time for a football app?
Patrick Fischer: It’s absolutely crunch time and we’re happy that it’s starting now. Of course, there’s always a special boom at major tournaments. In terms of advertising revenue, these are very important four weeks for us – or even eight weeks if you add in the four weeks of ramp-up to the tournament. In terms of usage, however, it’s not the case that accesses triple or quadruple. The reason: there are only three games on a regular group match day. There are many more on a normal Bundesliga match day.
OneFootball has been around since 2008, but the company is still not profitable. Why is it so hard to make money with it?
The point was: profitability was not in demand until now. We grew very quickly as a startup and growth in the sense of a growing number of users was the absolute premise. That was true for many startups at that time: profitability was not the focus for many, but growth. Now, however, interest rates have risen and the investment climate has changed. This changes the situation for everyone.
What does this mean for OneFootball?
If everything goes well, we will be profitable in 2025, which is our goal. This has already been the case for several months this year.
Last year there was a change in management at OneFootball. There were problems with a crypto business. And there were large-scale layoffs. What happened?
To do this, we need to briefly explain the background: At the beginning of 2022, the North American basketball league NBA made a lot of money from selling digitally recorded game moments based on the blockchain. So with digital sports artworks, so to speak. We wanted to do something similar and build a product with digital video moments in football. We concluded various licensing deals for this, with the Seria A and with numerous games. But when we had signed all the contracts, the so-called crypto winter set in.
So the time when blockchain projects and trading platforms got into trouble…
That’s right. The whole market was in ruins. We had to restructure all the contracts so that OneFootball could survive. It was a significant investment that we had made. However, it was difficult to raise money during this time, which is why we had to realign the cost base. We therefore had no choice but to make redundancies. We now have 240 employees, and over 250 employees have been made redundant. It was one of the hardest times for me personally. But that is now over.
Are you a fan yourself, or is this just business for you?
No, I am a real fan. I often don’t use the product as an employee, but rather as a fan. Which is sometimes difficult. But it is also a privilege.
Listen in the new episode of “Zero Hour“
· What Toni Kroos is doing on OneFootball
· Which market is the largest for the app
· Why the founder of OneFootball left the company
You can find all episodes directly at RTL+, Apple or Spotify or via Google.