Description:
1. The Pain:
With 3.5 billion fans, soccer is the world's most popular sport. Fans constantly are bombarded by information and updates from TV, newspaper, social media, websites and apps. Excess or useless information for each user leads to frustration and/or discouragement to follow their favorite team.
2. The Solution:
Football Loop is a global soccer news aggregator localized for each user’s language and league. Users can instantly receive news for their favorite team on their phones. Football Loop has generated over 120,000 downloads and 23,000 active users in 18 months. The application currently supports leagues in England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Russia, Greece, and Cyprus. More resources have been allocated to the Greek and Cypriot markets due to their higher level of success. After significant market testing and research, the team decided to focus less on soccer leagues where the market is already heavily saturated.
In addition to news aggregation, Football Loop also offers other features including: fully customizable, real-time notifications; match highlights and videos instantly after the game, automatically updated standings, predictions, enhanced statistics, tables and live scoring, fixtures, and results.
The proprietary news aggregator allows users to choose news from more than 15 sources for each team. Users are also able to fully customize their notification preferences by source. The application is on Apple and Google app stores. The team has developed a light version of the mobile application in a web-based format at www.footballloop.com.
3. Major Pivot/Expansion:
The team has chosen to expand into the Latin American market. Latin America is very similar to the Cyprus Market. According to the GSM Association, three of the top five markets for social media usage are in Latin America. These countries are rapidly improving their mobile network infrastructure; there are currently no soccer news aggregators in the pilot market. Latin American soccer fans are mainly using traditional media sources such as TV and newspapers. These fans also view team-specific websites and interact over social media. The overall goal is to expand further into Latin America and become the number one soccer news aggregator application.
