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In a different league

Posted By Clive Whittingham On 25-11-2015 @ 3:35 pm In News | Comments Disabled

Copa90 was the YouTube football channel without any football rights, but three years after launching it’s expanding into the US with backing from Liberty Global. CEO Tom Thirlwall outlines its strategy to Clive Whittingham.

Tom Thirlwall: We didn't want to get ex-footballers in suits, we wanted talent the audience related to

Tom Thirlwall: “We didn’t want to get ex-footballers in suits, we wanted talent the audience related to.”

As a football channel without the rights to show football, YouTube’s Copa90 is an odd proposition.

Tom Thirlwall, CEO of Bigballs Films, the London-based production company behind the channel, says the idea met with raised eyebrows from those in the traditional media space prior to its launch in 2012.

“We didn’t want to touch rights, we didn’t want to get ex-footballers in suits talking about the week in football, we wanted talent the audience related to and original content we owned that worked on YouTube,” Thirlwall says. “The aim was to tell the stories outside the 90 minutes that make the 90 matter more.

“We had a number of conversations with people in traditional media at the time who said building a football channel without any football was an oxymoron. There was no precedent for a sports media business being successful without rights to show the game they purported to cover.”

But Bigballs had previously won Cannes Gold Lion awards for a campaign with Adidas and Lionel Messi in 2011, then for a video-based game with Nike and We R Interactive called I Am Playr in 2012, so it had got to know the audience well.

Copa90 features viral football videos and top 10s plus longer-form factual content

Copa90 features viral football videos and top 10s plus longer-form factual content

“We knew things were changing,” Thirlwall says. “There were all these 19-year-olds getting live feeds of matches from sources online. They viewed Match of the Day or Sky’s Soccer Saturday as media for their parents. The scarcity traditional sports media built its business on – rights to one feed and then rights to a highlights package – was being seriously compromised by the young audience getting the game wherever they wanted to. What was scarce was original programming that helped audiences participate and contribute to the assessment of the game and wider stories around football.”

That teenage football obsessive is still a key part of the Copa90 audience – aged 16 to 22, into football, gaming, music, fashion and street wear. But the channel’s appeal has broadened and it now boasts more than a million subscribers.

Thirlwall says there is now one older demographic that loves football experiences, awaydays with their team, for example, but also takes the sport more seriously and will watch live games from Germany, Italy and the US as well as the UK. And another group, older still, engaged with football culture and rebellion against the more commercial, money-orientated elements of the modern sport. The channel’s demo stretches up to 35 now.

It makes the site’s content an eclectic mix of viral football videos and top 10s, as well as more serious and slightly longer-form factual content following football fans on away trips or highlighting the 20’s Plenty campaign about ticket prices.

Copa90The traditional media that initially doubted the channel’s reason for being has sat up and taken note: this is a very lucrative audience and one that’s increasingly turning away from linear television.

John Malone’s Liberty Global, along with venture capital firm e.ventures, recently paid £7m (US$10.8m) for a 14% stake in Bigballs, which still works on branded content but is now almost entirely focused on Copa90. The deal values the company at around £50m and there’s a third major investor still to be announced.

Bigballs has expanded by buying a similar outfit, KickTV, in New York for an undisclosed sum, taking its global head count up to just shy of 60. Thirlwall was frantically arranging a month-long stay in the US to get to grips with that business during this interview.

YouTube, which originally backed the start-up with an advance against advertising along with money from brands, has also made Copa90 one of its two big marketing pushes this year, along with SORTEDfood. Advertising campaigns have included a takeover of Waterloo train station in London.

“We’re the biggest football platform on YouTube and our ambition is to go way beyond that and create an era-defining sports media business that puts fans first,” says Thirlwall, an Arsenal fan.

The young, predominantly male, audience is also attractive to brands that want to be associated with football. Copa90 has partnered with companies including car manufacturer Hyundai, using its Fifa World Cup sponsorship to gain access to the tournament in Brazil last year. But Thirlwall says it’s wary about killing the golden goose when engaging with corporates.

“Our first conversation with brands is always about what we want to achieve and why the audience will love a particular series or film. We know our audience, we don’t need the brand to worry about that. We can create meaningful, authentic programming and they can be part of that,” he says.

“However, an approach we do get a lot – naming no names – starts off with a brand saying they’ve got a great idea for a film that’s been pitched to them by an agency. They want it to look a certain way, there’ll be a player involved and they want to pay for it to sit on our platform. Absolutely not. Not a chance.”

So about those rights… Global players like Liberty Global and Google/YouTube have deep pockets, could Copa90 be about to add a few 90s to the stories around the 90 after all?

“Rights hasn’t been a topic of conversation or a designated use of funds,” Thirlwall says. “But that’s not to discount it in the future.

“Where we are today, the money is to be invested against a non-rights proposition. That’s where Liberty think we’re most interesting; we own the IP and we’re a business that lets them become involved in sport without having to get on the rights merry-go-round.

“One more rights cycle where the price goes up the percentage it did for the Premier League last time [the rights for three years cost BT and Sky a combined £5.14bn, up from £3.01bn for the three previous years] then only the global players and tech giants will be able to compete for them.

“The problems those companies have is they don’t have communities built around sport, which is where we could come in. They’re going to look for companies with communities and fan bases – like us. But that’s me star-gazing.”


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