This week, we had the honor to interview Victorien Tixier, CEO of ScorePlay, a leading next-gen CMS that powers sport clubs digital channels.

ScorePlay is a leading startup that enables clubs to centralize distribute and monetize media photo and video content.

Here is a diagram illustrating ScorePlay’s solution:

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Picture: ScorePlay

?Show Notes: Throughout this interview, we touched on Victorien’s background, his startup and solution, the benefits for the teams to use its platform and his plans for the next 12 months.

Best Quotes: Here are some of the key discussion points and best quotes from our conversation with Victorien:

  • On his background: “I have a business background. I’ve studied business in France. I went to the US for an internship. It was four years ago now. I was working for a leading five-a-side soccer company called Sofive Soccer Centers. And there I started the first business, which was an automated video recording system for five-aside football. They have 10 centers in the US.
  • On how he met his cofounder and started ScorePlay: “
    • And that’s when I met my co-founder Xav, who has an engineering background. Then we worked on this side project for a while and then we wanted to do a bigger thing in sports and move to professional sports to get a bigger market. So we started to interview people from professional clubs. We started with soccer because it was where we had the biggest network and really quickly we understood that clubs were lacking tools to manage all the media content that they were creating.
    • “Clubs were hiring photographers, videographers, social media managers to capture more content, publish it on online, and send it to the athletes. But they didn’t have the right tools to be super efficient. And the brands were basically suffering from such issue. So concretely, they are spending hours searching for a particular photo or videos and they need a large media archive. They are being overwhelmed with requests from players that want to be able to publish photos on Instagram, right after the game. So they are dealing with never ending collaboration issues with the colleagues, partners and athletes. So yeah we said, “we should help them with that”. And last year in January we decided to launch a beta program with 10 football clubs”.
  • On ScorePlay product and what it provides to the clubs: “.
    • “We developed ScorePlay, which is a super easy SaaS platform that helps clubs centralize all their content. So now with our solution the photographer, videographers are uploading all the media content right after the game or the training. Automatically our tool tags the players and the sponsors logos. And then we automated the distribution, so we have a mobile app for the players so that they can receive it within a few seconds after the game. And we have dedicated access for the partners on our platform (..). We’re currently working with more than 30 teams globally and we are expanding to new sports such basketball, rugby, even eSports. We have a few first clients in eSports”.
  • On how much time clubs can save by using ScorePlay:
    • “The platform is super easy and quick to set up. So basically when we’re arrive in a sales call, we have already a platform ready for the club (..) We have two current benefits that are obvious. The first one is time saving. Now with our platform communication marketing teams don’t have to tag anything anymore. And they don’t have to manually send the content to the players and the partners or even internal team such as sales team (..) So the time saving is the first big benefit from using our platform that the clubs reported back to us”.
  • On the clubs’ and players’ ability to share more media content on social media after using their product:
    • “And the second one is brand building. They were all amazed by the increase in game photos and videos that the players were able to post on social media, thanks to our app. Because, right after the games in the locker room, what players would typically do is first go on their cell phones, on Instagram, and interact with the fans and the fact that with our app the clubs can now give them photos and videos of the games they just played, is a good way for them to post straight away and to interact with the fans. So in a club like Real Sociedad, we measured this with the clubs and it appeared that we helped generate a 150% increase in player post two hours after the game. And it’s a big thing for clubs, because that’s a way to make sure that fans continue to be engaged, not only during the game, but also after the game, which was super important”.
  • On helping the clubs monetize their content and entering the NFT space later this year:
    • “We want also to help club monetize those photos and videos, and as part of that, we’re working on an NFT project for clubs and athletes. I can’t tell you more on that for now because we are still working on each with a few data testers like we did for this tool. But it’s super promising and we will launch it later this year”.
  • On their plan for the next 12 months:
    • “We just raised a new round of funding a few months ago. We have two main goals. The first one is to be able to scale our platform and make it available to as many sports teams as possible. We want to do this in soccer where we already have dozens of clients, but also in other sports (..) It’s super important for us to be able to have country or market managers for these. So that’s why we hired someone for the US market. We will hire someone for the UK and Germany soon. So that’s the first big thing for us. And the second one is the monetization aspect and all the fun fan engagement experiences that you can create with media and all of that. At the end of the day, NFTs and blockchain is just a tool. And you need to think about how you can leverage this tool to find new ways to interact with the fans. So that would be our goal for this year. And we have started already working on these”.