Armony’s CEO, Mo Malkawi (left), and Fancision’s CEO, Alejandro Echeverria
Armed with game-changing technologies, a number of sportstech startups in Doha are reimagining the football experience. A number of the startup companies, some of which have come from as far as the US, UK, and Spain, are also seeking to showcase their innovative solutions at the upcoming World Cup in Qatar.
Armony, a London-based sportstech startup which has created the world’s first and only coach-player wireless communication system for football and other sports, is one such company. Its patent-pending technology, which is already being used by a number of football clubs in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, solves a major problem for football coaches worldwide – lack of effective and instantaneous communication with their players either during the games or training sessions.
“We hope to have the patent by the third quarter of 2021, while the technology has been developed a year and a half ago. It’s been tested and proven. And the feedback was amazing. When coaches used it, they realised that there was no point in sticking to the old school way of communication by shouting, yelling, and screaming,” Armony’s CEO Mo Malkawi said while talking to The Peninsula on the sidelines of the Qatar SportsTech’s (QST) Demo Day recently.
Armony’s technology, which connects a smart hardware to a software, provides live wireless verbal communication wherein coaches can immediately relay instructions to their players on the field.
“I myself was a professional football player and a coach. And I experienced firsthand the crucial moments when I need to deliver a very important piece of information to the player, and the player is 90 metres away. So we thought there must be a solution using technology for this. And we decided to be the company that solves this problem,” added Malkawi.
Dubbed as ‘the app for the best football fans’, Spanish startup Fancision, which merges fan engagement and gamification, has also come to Doha to introduce its technology to the Qatari market. The company has already entered the Spanish and Latin American markets, and now seeks to grow in the region with Qatar as its base. Fancision aims to penetrate an $8.4bn market looking to provide a fully entertaining experience for the fans. It has already secured deals with several professional clubs and is currently in late stage negotiations with the Qatar Stars League (QSL), Fancision’s CEO Alejandro Echeverria told The Peninsula.
The Fancision app acts as a platform where sports fans from across the world connect, play, compete for prizes, as well as participate in the decisions of their teams while also helping the teams increase their revenue by better monetising from their football fanbase.
Some of the main features of the app include trivias, minigames, predictions, challenges, chat, and voting on the decisions of the fans’ favourite clubs.
“It is estimated that clubs are missing out on about $500m in extra revenue every year just by not engaging their fans properly. And during the pandemic, this got way worse. The relationship between fans and teams is like a long-distance relationship. Fans watch scores and line-ups from afar. But they want to do more. There’s a lot of culture involved in football clubs, and fans also want to feel that they are being recognised for being a passionate fan. The World Cup is one of our dreams. We are very interested in the Mena region for the long period. However, we think we can also help Qatar make the World Cup even more memorable. We can help the fans engage from months earlier,” added Fancision’s Chief Technology Officer, Lorenzo Camejo.
Fan engagement is considered a major challenge in football. Add to that the dilemma of sponsors in trying to market their brands. US-based Golazzos aims to help bridge this gap.
“This is a massive market. There are 4 billion football fans in the world, and brands spend $100bn a year in marketing activation activities. We have this huge problem of brands that pay millions of dollars in sports sponsorship. And Golazzos is the perfect solution for them to achieve an incredible return on investment,” said Golazzo’s CEO, Antonio Faillace during the QST’s Demo Day recently.
