Tommaso Guerra (left), Co-Founder and CEO of Golee Holding, and Felice Biancardi, Co-Founder and Head of Sales and Partnerships at Golee during an interview with The Peninsula in Doha, recently.
As organisations around the world accelerate their digital transformation efforts, an Italian startup has come to Doha seeking to offer its ‘one-stop platform for sport clubs’, and help amateur football clubs digitalise their daily operations and improve their online image. A practical move which the founders say helps increase a club’s revenue, while saving time and money.
“We see that we share the same values with Qatar. We believe that sports is a fundamental pillar for the society, and a vehicle through which you can spread values and education. In the sportstech industry, most of the focus is towards high-end technology or expensive technology that goes for the few. But sports is for everybody. So we’re developing simple, needed and scalable technology in order to penetrate the whole market,” said Tommaso Guerra, Co-Founder and CEO of Golee Holding, in an interview with The Peninsula recently.
The startup offers digital solutions for managing all the administrative, financial and sport activities of a club.
It also has an online app which helps coaches manage workouts, as well as monitor the progress and statistics of their athletes. The platform also helps clubs develop their own website to improve their online image, and increase their revenues by embarking on e-commerce where they sell their own merchandise through online stores.
To date, Golee is considered a ‘first mover’ in Italy, and has developed partnerships with over 400 clubs and 200 coaches. About 150 clubs also sell their merchandise with the Golee store, while 100 clubs are now online with the Golee web.
The startup, which is also part of the second cohort of the Qatar SportsTech’s (QST) acceleration programme, chose Qatar as their first foreign market to explore, with plans of expanding regionally and internationally.
“We launched in Italy in 2018 and have a partnership with the Federation Italy. We want to consolidate the Italian market, because we’re talking about 13,000 clubs for football only in Italy. We’re now planning to expand internationally. And the first market that we want to expand to is Qatar, especially with the investments Qatar is doing in sports. On digitalisation of the sports sector, Qatar has a really strong view on how to give this tool to the sports community. And we want to be a partner for digital tools and digital infrastructure in the sports ecosystem,” added Felice Biancardi, Co-Founder and Head of Sales and Partnerships at Golee.
According to Guerra, the company has been in touch with the Qatar Stars League, and eyes partnerships with the Qatar Football Federation and the Aspire Academy.
“The World Cup is one of the first reasons why we wanted to come to Qatar. In a couple of years we will be in the centre of the football world. That’s where we belong. And we’re working to close the gap between the amateur and the professional clubs,” Guerra said.
According to a study conducted by PwC, adoption of a data culture within a club’s organisation is key to maintaining a competitive edge in the age of highly demanding digital natives. It added that the digital wave has already impacted every function within the football clubs, with each developing its own digital solutions to optimise revenues and operations. Merchandising is boosting operations and rolling out integrated digital supply chain across physical points of sale and online, while boosting the ability to personalise products. Club websites and mobile applications are also becoming more sophisticated in their distribution of text, data, video and image content.
