AMSTERDAM ENTREPRENEURSHIP CASES

Joris Ebbers
Associate professor Entrepreneurship and Innovation
University of Amsterdam
December 1, 2017
Introduction
“I think it [FootMapp] is interesting because we have objective data. It is linked to the
video we generate from every match and it has a lot of tools to automatically detect
situations we consider interesting. This makes it easy to show the players what we
want to improve. And they learn from the matches they played.”
Pablo Manzanet Montford, assistant coach Villarreal FC
Metrica Sports provides tactical analysis tools to improve the performance of football – or
soccer – players through easy-to-use, customer centered software for data and video analysis.
Their core product is the software FootMapp, which provides clubs with detection of key
moments or movements using pattern recognition technology and original video of matches
with overlaid annotated visualizations. The tool can be tailored for each customer to detect
any situation, especially those that are hard for the human eye to notice. FootMapp can plot
and visualize the relevant information in a fast, flexible and easy way, which improves the
interaction between coaches and trainers with their players by showing them hard facts in a
visual and intuitive way directly connected to the video.
At the time of writing (October 2017) Metrica Sports has 6 full time employees: 4 software
developers, responsible for further building the tactical analysis tool, 1 operations manager,
responsible for the tracking of the sports players, and 1 sales / business developer. In addition,
they have over 30 contractors that get paid by the hour through an employment agency. Most
of these contractors are students that want to make some extra money next to these studies.
Metrica Sports currently focuses its attention and resources on targeting the football market.
Their annual revenue is about €500.000. Although valuing an early stage company is difficult,
investors value it around €6 to €12 million.
METRICA
SPORTS
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Background of the founders
Metrica Sports has three founders. First, Ruben Saavedra (Chief Executive Officer), born in
1981, from Barcelona, Spain. As the CEO, he is responsible for all business-related matters,
including sales. Saavedra has a Bachelor degree in biotechnology from the Universitat
Autonoma de Barcelona, a Master degree, worked three years in the UK in pharmaceutical
companies, and started a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. He was close
to completing his PhD when he founded Metrica Sports. He does not have an intention to
complete his PhD dissertation after having experienced founding his own company.
Saavedra comes from an entrepreneurial family. His father, like many immigrants from the
south of Spain at the time, started working in Barcelona while still a teenager and now owns
his own successful company selling frozen fish to restaurants and employing about 10 people.
Although Saavedra never had an intention to become an entrepreneur himself, the option of
starting his own company crossed his path when he discussed his passion for football with his
friend (and what would turn out to be his cofounder) Bruno Dagnino: “We saw an opportunity
of doing things that we liked. Basically, that’s how we started”.
The second founder is Bruno Dagnino (Chief Technology Officer), born in 1985, from Buenos
Aires, Argentina. He is in charge of data analysis and processes. After studying economics in
high school, and a year of engineering at university, he switched to physics, where he
developed an interest in neuroscience and econophysics. At the time, quite some physicists
made a living building economic models for financial institutions. Next, he started a PhD in
cognitive neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. In the last year of his PhD contract he
worked on his dissertation during the day and Metrica Sports in the evenings and weekends,
and vice versa when his PhD contract ended. He completed his PhD in November 2016.
Similarly, Dagnino also never thought he would start his own business. Even though he was
interested in economics and business ever since high school, rather than starting his own
business he thought it would be more likely that he would be applying his physics skills
working for someone else’s company. Contrary to Saavedra, he does not come from an
entrepreneurial family, in the sense of family members having founded their own company.
His father worked for Exxon Mobil in the oil business for most of his career, and his younger
brother works in international trade and commerce in the port of Buenos Aires.
The third founder is Enzo Angilletta (Chief Design Officer), born in 1982, and also from Buenos
Aires, Argentina. He is in charge of video, UX and UI design. He studied filmmaking in Buenos
Aires, especially the artistic and storytelling aspects of it. After graduating in 2005, he started
working for TV producers. First as a cameraman, and later as a video editor. In 2009, when he
was living in Buenos Aires and his girlfriend in Madrid, they wanted to live together in a place
they did not yet know. Since she is a marine biologist, and he needed an international and
culturally rich city to build his video production business, Amsterdam seemed a good fit. In
2009, they moved to Amsterdam, where he set up shop working as a self-employed
professional, producing videos for international media and tourism companies.
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Contrary to Saavedra and Dagnino, Angilletta already had experience being an entrepreneur
and owning his own company. As a consequence, for him, the idea and decision of founding
Metrica Sports was not that radical. Moreover, he grew up in an entrepreneurial environment
because his family owns a car parts company in Argentina. Starting from scratch, his father
build the business over a period of 40 years. After he retired, Angiletta’s two brothers and
brother-in-law successfully took over the company. In his family, risk taking is not perceived
as being a big deal. You just try something, and if it doesn’t work you move on.
How it started
Saavedra and Dagnino met at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience of the University of
Amsterdam where they both worked as a PhD researcher, yet in a different subfield and
building. They would often meet for lunch and started a football team to get “nerd scientists
to play football and get out of the lab (Saavedra)”. They also met the third founder – Angilletta
– through playing football. First through the ‘Argentinians playing football in the Netherlands’
Facebook page, and later through the local FC Barcelona fan club that Saavedra set up. When
Saavedra moved to Amsterdam in 2008, being a big FC Barcelona fan, he watched many
Barcelona matches in local bars. At some point, however, he wondered why everyone was
watching matches in different bars:
“So, I thought why do we always watch Barça games with 5 people. There’s probably
now, like, 20 bars in Amsterdam showing the same game with 5 people in each bar.
Wouldn’t it be nice if these 100 people were all together in a place watching it
together?”
As part of the solution he decided to found the Official FC Barcelona fan club that, to his
surprise, did not yet exist. Being the initiator, he also took up the role of president, which he
performed for about 6 years. One of the first things he did was to make an agreement with a
local Catalan restaurant called Taverna Barcelona in the Pijp neighborhood to open the
restaurant more or less exclusively for the fan club whenever there is an FC Barcelona match.
Restaurant Taverna imports all their ingredients and everything else they sell from Catalunya,
even the tomatoes.
Around that time both Saavedra and Dagnino were becoming disappointed with how science
and the academic system works and lost their motivation to work on their PhD dissertation.
As a result, they started thinking about alternatives. According to Dagnino:
“I grew a little bit disappointed about the way science works. So, actually, before I
started Metrica Sports, my first inclination was to work for a football club. So, I
thought, OK, I like football, and I know how to analyze data, so maybe I can work for
a football club…I was not really motivated in the last years of my PhD. So, I thought,
what would really motivate me, that is still challenging and where I can apply my skills
but it would be more fun? And then I thought about working for a football club. So, my
first idea was not to start Metrica, but just working for a football club.”
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At the research institute where they were still working on their PhDs, they saw a flyer from
the Postdoc Career Development Initiative that organizes 2-day retreats for scientists that are
considering a career outside the university environment. For academics working at the
university, it would be paid for by the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. The goal of the
retreat was to connect academics that are considering a switch to business, with former
academics that currently work for other or set up their own companies. Here they met a
person who set up his own biotech company. After having heard his story, Dagnino said to
Saavedra: “If this guy could start a company, so can we.”
Saavedra and Dagnino combined their data and analytics skills with Angilletta’s video and
editing skills. During their PhD research, the first two developed expertise in analyzing,
tracking and making sense of complex positional data, and realized that this data is also
available in football. According to Saavedra: “That’s what clubs were actually looking for, and
that’s what we started”. They both knew they did not want to pursue an academic career,
going from one temporary research position to another, and saw this as a unique opportunity
to combine their analytical skills with their passion for football.
The first idea for Metrica Sports was born in early 2013, while having after work beers in
student-owned and run bar and cinema Kriterion in the center of Amsterdam. The three of
them would have passionate discussions about football. At some point, they were talking
about how useful it would be to have more sophisticated software to support their
discussions about football tactics. From there, it was a small step from how other football
fans would enjoy it, to the value it could create for media companies providing sports content,
and ultimately the football clubs themselves. According to Angilletta:
“Everything started with talking about football. We thought we didn’t have anything
to support our discussions and stuff. And we thought: OK, it would be great to have
something that can empower our vision of the game.”
Before starting, they spent more than a year researching. So, by the time they set up the
company, they knew very well what was needed. They found out that even though the data
was available, people were doing very little with it. The first professional match they used as
a pilot was with Dutch football club Vitesse. They got into contact with Vitesse through a
father of a friend of a friend of a friend. Right after recording the match, they promised to
send the data to Vitesse within 24 hours. Next, the three of them worked around the clock to
prepare the data, finishing just before the deadline. At that time, they had to do everything
by hand, from tracking the individual players to presenting the findings.
In late 2013, they went to Spain to further develop the product, collect information about the
football market, and gauge interest from football clubs. Saavedra had some contacts at third
division football clubs where they could experiment by allowing them to record and analyze
matches to develop their ideas. In July, 2014, they contracted their first paying customer,
Spanish football club Villarreal CF. According to Marcelino García Toral, its Head Coach, they
signed the contract because: “We believe that Metrica Sports will help us by reducing the
time we spent nowadays in tactical analysis, making it more efficient, and empowering the
communication with our players through strong facts in a visual and intuitive way”.
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Family and friends
Each of the founders discussed their ambition to start a company with their girlfriends. What
helped was that because Saavedra, Dagnino and Angilletta had become close friends, so did
their girlfriends, who also talked about it among the three of them. Saavedra told his girlfriend
that he would need a few thousand euros from their joint savings for doing basic research
and exploring the business idea. Being a rational scientist, his philosophy was that if it would
not work out, he would have spent 6 months of his life figuring out how to start a business,
which is always a good learning experience. He thought he could always go back to working
in a lab, or figure out something else to do. Exploring this opportunity motivated him a lot:
“I had been living together with my girlfriend, so she knew how unhappy I was with what
I was doing. So, I think seeing me motivated for something was really enough for her to
say ‘just go ahead’. She was always very supportive. She never understood what we had
in mind: ‘I don’t really understand what you want to do, but if you say so just go ahead’.”
Dagnino also involved his girlfriend in the decision. When decided to focus on Metrica Sports,
he was not entitled to receiving unemployment benefits from the local government. In order
to get it, he would have to attend courses to improve his job application skills and present a
business plan. However, he did not have time for this because he was already working on
Metrica Sports, which was going quite well from the start. As a consequence, he and his
girlfriend were living of her salary and their savings for about four months. According to
Angilletta himself, his girlfriend is very positive and open minded and when she saw his eyes
light up when he talked about Metrica Sports, it was clear to her that he was very passionate
about it. After making the personal decision to move back from Buenos Aires to Amsterdam,
it helped that it was relatively easy for her to find a job at the University of Amsterdam.
Saavedra was the first in the family to go to university, and even pursuing a PhD. So, for his
parents it came as quite a shock. While his father was mostly supportive, his mother did not
understand why he would give up his academic career. Similarly, Dagnino’s father suggested
that instead of quitting his job and starting a company, he could talk with his boss to see if his
current job could be made a bit more attractive. Although in the beginning, his parents did
not quite understand what Metrica Sports was all about, eventually they were very
supportive. Finally, Angilletta did not involve his parents too much in his decision to start a
new business. At first, they also did not really understand the business he was getting into,
but they have always given him a lot of confidence when exploring new things.
Accelerators and incubators
In their early stage, Metrica Sports applied for the accelerator program Startupbootcamp in
Amsterdam. Participants who are selected to join this program receive €15.000 in cash to
cover living expenses, office space, an intensive 3-month training program, and mentoring by
experienced entrepreneurs. The program culminates in Demo Day, where teams pitch their
business idea to an audience of investors, entrepreneurs and journalists. In exchange,
Startupbootcamp receives a 6-8% equity stake in all the participating startups. Metrica Sports
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was one of the 20 that made it to the 3-day selection days. Here they met Startupbootcamp’s
investment team, mentors, and corporate partners to pitch their initial business idea. In the
end, they were not one of the 10 teams that were invited to join the 3-month program.
When Bruno Dagnino shared his experiences at Startupbootcamp with a friend at work, this
person introduced him to Jeroen van Duffelen, who back then was coordinating the start of
the first business incubator of the University of Amsterdam: ACE Venture Lab. ACE stands for
Amsterdam Center for Entrepreneurship, a non-profit foundation at the Faculty of Economics
and Business, whose original goal was to stimulate entrepreneurship among university
students. Once this goal was achieved through developing entrepreneurship courses and
education programs, ACE changed its focus to incubation activities for university spinoffs.
Metrica Sports joined ACE Venture Lab in February, 2014. ACE Venture Lab offers business
training for (aspiring) entrepreneurs, access to a network of experts, coaching and mentoring
by experienced entrepreneurs, and office space with shared facilities.
When they entered the ACE Venture Lab bootcamp, they had already done a lot of research,
and build an MVP without knowing what an MVP was “because I’d never heard MVP before,
only in basketball: the most valuable player [Saavedra]”. ACE Venture Lab helped them a lot,
for example in actually setting up the company. Besides Angilletta, who had prior experience
running his own business as a freelancer, none of them had started a business before. ACE
Venture Lab also helped them to systematically test and develop their business ideas
“through talking to analysts and coaches, validating and finding out how they were working,
what they were doing with data (Saavedra)”.
ACE Venture Lab especially added value through their network of expert advisors and
coaches. Whenever they had a problem or a question, they would go to its director Jeroen
van Duffelen and later Erik Boer, who would hook them up with the experts, advisors, and
mentors in ACE Venture Lab’s professional network. On Fridays, most of the advisors are in
the office building and available for free advice. Whenever there are specific needs, such as
drafting actual contracts, the startups will have to pay. Metrica Sports, for example, hired one
of the advisors in the ACE Venture Lab network to set up their formal company structure, a
Holding structure with three separate Private Limited companies for each of the three
founders and their investor. In the words of Saavedra:
“Everything from setting up the structure of the company… you know, each of us has
a holding and it’s a Private limited company. We didn’t know what a Private limited
company or Limited liability partnership1, and all these kind of things, were. So, they
gave us a lot of information about that. And then during the first year or so, a lot of
strategic advice as well.”
Robert Meijer, for example, provided them with valuable financial advice. Meijer has a legal
and tax background and has been working in the banking industry for over 20 years, where
he was responsible for financing small and medium sized companies. Later he became active
1
A Private limited company is a Besloten Vennootschap (B.V.). A Limited liability partnership is a
Vennootschap onder Firma (VOF).
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as a startup coach. However, their most important mentor was, and still is, Gigi Wang. Wang,
who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, is an experienced entrepreneur, startup investor, and
head of consulting firm MG-Team through which she offers entrepreneurship related training
and advice. In addition, she is a faculty member in UC Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship
and involved in Stanford University’s Venture Lab (VLAB).
The first customer
Finding a first customer was very difficult. They have tried absolutely everything. It involved
a lot of cold calling, cold emailing, and even handwritten letters, with no one replying or
showing interest. At some point, they started recording personalized videos, in which they
addressed themselves to the coach, and sending these videos to some of the football coaches
that have a personal profile on LinkedIn. If you are prepared to pay a small amount of money,
you can contact anyone with a profile on LinkedIn via the InMail tool. However, this strategy
didn’t work out either. Eventually, Twitter played an important role in finding their first
customer: Spanish football club Villarreal CF.
They did not target Villarreal CF randomly. The club is known in Spain for being a very
innovative club with an open mind about new technology. Some years earlier, they were also
the launching customer of another startup. Being aware of this, Saavedra went to their
website to learn about the organizational structure of the club. They found out that the club
had three analysts, and noticed that one of them – Dario Drudi – was a young Argentinian
assistant coach in his mid 20s, which is quite young for such an important position. They
decided to contact him though Twitter, using the fact the 2 of the 3 founders of Metrica Sports
are also Argentinian. Since Villarreal FC is a relatively small club things went fast from the first
contact to the final contract. As Saavedra recalls:
“I sent him – Dario Drudi – a tweet pretending I was Argentinian as well [Saavedra is
actually Catalan], and told him ‘listen, we are three Argentinians in Amsterdam
starting this project. You are a young analyst with a promising future. I think you’ll like
what we have. Can we meet and I’ll show you?’ And then he said: ‘yes, sure’. And I
went, he saw it, and he was like ‘wow, the coach needs to see that’. Next, he called in
the coach. The coach saw it, and then he said ‘wow, I want it’. I talked to the sports
director, and the day after I was negotiating with the president.”
When Dario Drudi, known for always being on the lookout for new things, received the tweet
he informed his colleague Pablo Manzanet Monfort, who is not a big user of Twitter or other
social media himself. Manzanet’s role was that of fitness coach and tactical analyst. He
collects data from training sessions and matches that can be used to improve the
performance of the team and its players. They both immediately saw the potential of
software. At that time, data and video were not integrated, while Footmapp allows one to
combine everything at once. When they showed the product to the head coach, who is
obsessed with analysing matches, he was very excited. So, they tweeted back, and invited
Metrica Sports to come over to the club.
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Villarreal, and especially Manzanet, played an important role in the technical development of
Footmapp. Manzanet is usually the one who uses Footmapp to prepare information for the
head coach and sometimes assists him in showing it to the players. He started to work very
closely with Metrica Sports because he wanted to have a tool that could satisfy the wishes of
the head coach.
“Each month we [he and Saavedra] speak two or three times to make it [Footmapp]
better. I have an idea and I tell him, they have an idea and they speak to me about it.
So, we are always in contact to improve the tool…It [Footmapp] is also like my son.
It’s their son but it’s like my son-in-law.”
The first investor
After they sold their MVP to Villarreal CF in June 2014 they still had to produce the actual
software tool. Moreover, Villarreal CF expected to have a fully operating product in August,
before the start of the new football season. They expected to need €100.000. However,
getting a bank loan was not an option because Saavedra already received a personal bank
loan of €100.000 to start Metrica Sports. As explained by Saavedra:
“We sold the MVP to Villarreal but we still had to make the product. We had three months
to make the product but we didn’t have the money or the hands, so we had to find the
money and find the hands to do it.”
Because they needed cash fast, they contacted Chang Ng, a serial entrepreneur and investor,
who they met during the selection days of Startupbootcamp where he was one of the roughly
200 mentors to who they pitched their business idea. Even though they were not selected for
Startupbootcamp, when they were having drinks at the end of the day, Ng came up to them
and said that he liked their idea, thought it was very promising, and told them not to hesitate
to contact him in the future. Shortly after signing Villarreal CF, they contacted Ng telling him
they had found a customer and were looking for €100.000 to build the product.
Ng has an MSc degree in financial economics from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. After
having worked as a consultant for Cap Gemini and Ernst & Young, he started his own company
Mconomy selling mobile and smart phone accessories. After having successfully build this
company, Ng was looking for a new purpose. Because he enjoys sharing his experience, in
2011 he decided to become a mentor for startups. He also started to invest in technology
startups and became an associate partner at venture capital firm Capital Mills. According to
NG himself, he is not a purely rational investor who checks boxes, but someone who follows
his intuition. When he met Saavedra and Dagnino at Startupbootcamp, he was not only
interested in the product but also its founders, who struck him as being both intelligent and
passionate.
When Ng showed an interest to invest in Metrica Sports, the founders contacted their most
trusted and valued mentor, Gigi Wang, and asked her for advice. She advised them hire a
lawyer to help them set up the deal with Ng and put them into contact with a law firm called
SOLV that was also a network partner of ACE Venture Lab. She met one of their lawyers on
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the ready-to-scale business trip he made to Silicon Valley. This trip is organized annually by
ACE Venture Lab to help Dutch entrepreneurs understand the entrepreneurial ecosystem in
Silicon Valley and to build a local network. Gigi Wang is the local partner who co-designs the
program and facilitates meetings between Dutch and local entrepreneurs and companies. In
return for his €100.000 investment, Ng received a 10% equity stake.
The first employee
Since none of the three co-founders was a software developer, they had to deliver a product
that they themselves could not make. They therefore outsourced this to a friend of Saavedra
from his hometown Barcelona, Marc Baiges, who they hired for 2 to 3 months to build the
first version of the product. Having known him ever since he was 4 years old, he was almost
like Saavedra’s brother, and he trusted him completely. Mark was not interested in becoming
a co-founder of the company because he preferred to have more security.
They hired their first fulltime employee, a lead developer, in January, 2015. Before finding
him, they first hired someone else through regular job postings on websites. However, after
a two-week trial period they decided to terminate his contract. This was not because of his
technical skills in computer vision, but because he did not fit in the team. In addition, they
wanted to prioritize product development. Not long after they posted the new job opening
on several websites, co-founder Bruno Dagnino met fellow Argentinian Guido Villaverde
through a mutual friend with who he was visiting Amsterdam as a tourist. Villaverde’s friend
and Dagnino studied physics together in Buenos Aires. This mutual friend suggested to have
a beer with the three of them in Amsterdam around the time they signed their first contract
with Spanish football club Villarreal FC in July 2014. When Dagnino told him about Metrica
Sports and what they were doing, Villaverde said he loved to get involved.
After studying film studies for a year, Villaverde was active as a musician and became more
and more interested in mixing music with technology. He therefore enrolled for a university
degree in computer science in Buenos Aires. However, after one year he decided it would be
more efficient to teach it himself using online resources, such as those from Stanford
University. He got his first computer programming job, producing a website, from his father
who back then was running his own small IT company. After having worked for an educational
TV channel, he co-founded a video game production company with a couple of programmers,
animation artists, and a game designer. He did this for about two years.
“Some of the technologies, I was, like, really looking into. At that time, I was mainly
making video games, so it’s really different, you know, the tools that you use to make
video games and the tools you use to make this kind of software, but I was into it and
I had a few freelance jobs where I used the same technologies that they were using, so
for me it was, OK, this is really interesting.”
When he came back to Argentina after his tourist trip to Amsterdam, about a month later
their mutual friend send him a Facebook post by Dagnino saying that they were looking for a
developer. After a couple of interviews with the founders in which they also wanted to make
absolutely sure he shared their passion for and knowledge about football, and a challenging
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programming assignment, he was hired not much later in January 2015. As part of his hiring
package, he was also offered a 3% equity stake in the company. This meant that each of the
3 founders would give up 1% of their equity. However, it took about another year to get the
work permit through the immigration office. In the meantime, he worked remotely from
Buenos Aires.
Villaverde had the impression that the cultural fit was perhaps more important than the
technical fit with the team. Moreover, since none of the three co-founders were
programmers themselves, it was very difficult for them to judge Villaverde’s programming
skills. According to Villaverde: “they were trying to do their best in order to judge something
they actually didn’t completely understand.” Besides the cultural fit, it was important that
Villaverde was transparent about his strengths and weaknesses when it comes to his
programming skills. They were looking for someone who is independent, has general instead
of specialist programming skills, a strong learning orientation, and who can adapt in the fastchanging environment of a technology startup.
Building the market
Villarreal FC’s Manzanet, besides being actively involved in developing Footmapp as their first
customer, also played an important role in promoting Metrica Sports and their product
Footmapp in the football industry. For example, he gave a presentation about how Villareal
FC was using FootMapp to a large audience of industry professionals at the Sports Technology
Symposium organized by FC Barcelona. He also gave a lecture in the Master of Sports Analysis
program at Valencia University on the same topic. In addition, some well-known sports
journalists published stories about him and how Villarreal FC uses Metrica Sport’s Footmapp.
Perhaps most importantly, whenever his team goes to a match in for example Vigo, Madrid,
Bilbao or Seville and Manzanet is setting up the cameras to register the match, his colleagues
at these other clubs often ask him what he is doing, and how he uses the video footage and
analytics to train the players. Manzanet often takes the time to explain or demonstrate how
it works, refers them to Saavedra or Metrica Sports, and, vice versa, provides Saavedra with
referrals and contact information about colleagues that have shown interest in Footmapp.
One of the football teams who asked Manzanet about his use of Footmapp was FC Barcelona.
Sometime before, when FC Barcelona was going to play against Ajax FC in Amsterdam, being
the president of the local FC Barcelona fan club, Metrica Sports’ Saavedra organised a dinner
before the match for which he personally invited some people from FC Barcelona. One of the
people that showed up at the fan club dinner was Mr. Vilanova, the Vice President of
Economic and Social Affairs (VP ESA). During the dinner Saavedra told the VP ESA about what
he was doing with Metrica Sports, and used this opportunity to pitch Footmapp.
“He asked me what I was doing and I explained it to him and then I said ‘well it would
be nice to talk to someone in Barcelona’ and he said ‘okay, let’s plan a meeting when
you are in Barcelona, then you can show me’. After I showed it to him the next time I
was in Barcelona, he put me into contact with someone in the club.”
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The person he put him into contact with was Raúl Peláez, Head of Methodology and Sports
Science at FC Barcelona. Earlier, Saavedra was already put into contact with him through the
husband of the best friend of his mother, who was the director of the Hristo Stoichkov
Football School. Besides setting up a lunch with a lower level FC Barcelona employee, Vilanova
put Saavedra in contact with analysts working below Peláez, who, in turn, introduced him to
people higher in the organization. Before closing the deal, they had more than ten meetings.
Besides Peláez, this included analysts, people at the medical department, and the first and
second team. Ultimately, Peláez also had to convince FC Barcelona’s CEO before they could
finally sign the deal.
The fact that prestigious football club FC Barcelona had become a customer created a lot of
buzz and attention from other clubs. However, scaling up the company turned out to be
challenging because each customer has its own specific tactics and analytical needs. For
example, Villarreal FC, uses the software for presentations to a single team and on a gameby-game short-term basis. This makes their workflow relatively simple. FC Barcelona, on the
other hand, wants to use Footmapp for all their divisions and teams, including the first men’s
and women’s teams, and youth teams. In addition, they asked for more, and more complex,
data analytics. This required a lot of additional product development efforts.
What’s next
Metrica Sports currently has the following customers that use their tactical analysis software
Footmapp: Villarreal FC (June, 2014), FC Barcelona (August, 2016), US football club and
winner of the MLS 2016 Seattle Sounders (February, 2017), the Professional Referee
Organization (PRO) (March, 2017), and the US Soccer Federation (June, 2017). PRO is the
organization responsible for managing the referee and assistant referee program in
professional football leagues in the United States and Canada. The US Soccer Federation is
responsible for the national football (or soccer) team of the US. At the time of writing, they
are negotiating with a number of clubs in Europe and the US, as well as the German football
league as a whole. Closing a deal with the whole German league would mean they go from 3
to 39 clubs in their portfolio of customers.
Saavedra expects the company to at least double in size in the coming year. The main focus
of attention is building a sales department. Sales is currently done by Saavedra as part of his
CEO role. They recently hired a sales person to cover the US market, who used to work for
one of their main competitors: Catapult. The aim is to hire two more sales persons that each
cover a specific geographic market, and who speak the language and understand the
intricacies of culture. Saavedra will take up the role of managing this new sales team.
Metrica Sports is currently in a crucial phase. Because they need to scale up fast to ward off
large competitors, organic growth is not seen as a viable option. They are therefore aiming
for a €1.5 million investment. Before negotiating with FC Barcelona, they were operating
more or less under the radar. But once they got involved with FC Barcelona, they caught the
attention of their three direct competitors, which are large $500+ million companies. For
example, STATS, the company owning the sports data and analytics tool Prozone, aggressively
tried to retain FC Barcelona as their customer. According to Saavedra:
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“FC Barcelona had a contract with Prozone, one of our competitors, and they stopped,
they cancelled their contract with Prozone to start with us. Next Prozone offered them
three years for free because they can afford it. They don’t want to lose FC Barcelona
as a customer so they are willing to give it to them for free.”
Mid 2017, Metrica Sports came close to an exit through an aqui-hire by Catapult, a large
sports data and analytics company from Australia. Shortly after they were approached by this
company, Saavedra, Dagnino and Angilletta flew to Australia to start the negotiations.
However, their first and sole investor – Chang Ng – tried to convince them not to go.
Ultimately, the founders agreed with their investor and did not get to an agreement with
Catapult, and decided to keep going on their own.
In the near future, Metrica Sports, having limited resources that requires them to focus, has
first set their mind on becoming the dominant player in the football market. They are
therefore working hard to add new customers and build credibility. Early adopters play an
important role in further developing FootMapp and convincing other clubs to buy it. Once
they conquered the football market, they want to target other tactical team sports because
it is specifically these types of sports where they can add most value. They are especially
considering basketball, American football, hockey and rugby, but exploring other possibilities.
Besides being tactical team sports, these sports are also popular enough that clubs can afford
to buy FootMapp. What the future will hold is hard to tell because startups are bumpy and
football is war.