SportTech 2019: Embracing football fan culture with COPA90 By Will Strauss, Editor
Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - 10:08
Print This Story
At SportTech 2019, Copa90 chief product officer and general manager Barry Flanigan took delegates inside the hugely successful football media business, revealing how it found its USP in what is an overcrowded market by turning the camera away from the pitch.
You to go traditional media to find out what has happened in a game, he told a packed auditorium at Lord's cricket ground on 22 May 2019.
You get the scores, the stats, the line-ups. But you come to COPA90 to understand how you feel about it. It's that emotional connection with the game. We cover fan culture and that is what matters to a young fanbase in particular.
COPA90 is a hub for that global football-obsessed youth culture.
Starting out as what Flanigan calls a scrappy YouTube channel in 2012, it has since become a distributed network across every social platform, from Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat to Weibo and VK.
Our audience wasn't passive. They were interacting. They wanted to be involved in the content. We recognised there was an opportunity to scale things across every platform that matters to young fans.
The company is now building out its owned and operated channels too, with a distribution network of more than 200 publishers, influencers and broadcasters worldwide.
Unlike many Fan TV-type offerings, the central premise for COPA90 is around storytelling.
If we are making a piece of content it's got to be entertaining, it's got to have a central [narrative], he said. What we are not trying to do is just make fan content for the sake of it.
Building a community
Following launch, COPA90 very quickly found that it had developed not just followers and viewers but a fan community.
Our audience wasn't passive. They were interacting. They wanted to be involved in the content, he continued. We recognised there was an opportunity to scale things across every platform that matters to young fans.
And that is precisely what COPA90 has done. Fast forward to 2019 and the media business creates roughly 2,000 pieces of content per month and gets between 200 and 300 million video views across that content. But the premise has stayed the same. Fans are still at the centre. They submit video and they even suggest which stories to tell.
What started as a casual relationship is now much more formal as COPA90 has looked to harness the opportunity. The upshot is the COPA90 Creator Network.
Flanigan said that the idea is to empower a generation of young fans to tell the stories that matter to them. There are about 4,000 fans now. They are the fan engine at the heart of the business, he added.
The fan content on COPA90 can be anything from supporter reactions when a goal is scored to longer-form authored stories with high production values that mainstream media wouldn't cover.
For the former, the important thing is getting near real-time content: action that occurs when games are on.
That content is less about the quality, it is about capturing the moment, said Flanigan.
Up for the cup
In Russia, during the 2018 World Cup, when Germany were eliminated from the tournament, COPA90 had fan creators in Berlin, in Mexico City and at the game itself.
With that type of content, you cannot plan for it in advance. It is all about what they send to us. They send it to us very quickly and then, within our system, we manage their content, harness it and publish it.
The other type of content is the long-form filmmaking. For this, the company runs the COPA90 Commissions Programme. This offers a financial grant for fans to tell stories that matter to them.
Flanigan cited two examples: a film about football in Palestine and a story about amputee football.
It's a bit of a myth that young people don't want to interact with content that is outside of the big teams, big players and big leagues, he argued.
If the storytelling is strong, and if it's told in an authentic way, then young fans will watch it. If you can deliver it on the right platform then you can really drive engagement.
The 2018 World Cup was a particularly significant event for COPA90.
We tripled our output, publishing about 6,000 pieces of content, continued Flanigan. We had a production HQ in Moscow and then teams roving around Russia. We also had a team in Latin America, capturing the moments for the teams there. London, LA and New York also had teams working on content. We scaled our views, doing about 750m.
Perhaps most significantly, the company also experimented with taking COPA90 beyond digital and into the real world and what Flanigan describes as an experiential space.
One of the things that was hugely successful was our Moscow HQ, he revealed.
We turned it into a fan venue that we called the COPA90 Clubhouse. We did match screenings, live events, DJ parties, exhibitions. That became a place where fans were hanging out with COPA90.
A book was also launched, along with a range of merchandise.
It was a great example of where we drove scale in terms of people watching our video but, almost as important for us, we took the brand into different places where we could interact with our fans.
Daring to dream
The Women's World Cup, currently taking place in France, is another big event for COPA90.
Again, it is running a Clubhouse, this time in Paris, and there will be at least four creators covering each game: two at the ground and then one in each of the fan venues and fan parks back home.
Women's football in general and the World Cup, in particular, is a real moment in time. It's been an area of the sport that has been underserved and under-represented in media. But you've got this fantastic fan culture of its own. You've got bri
Most recent headlines
16/12/2025
Hawkins has landed on Spotify, just in time for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume...
16/12/2025
Wherever you are, your favorite music and audio content should go seamlessly with you. That's why Spotify has partnered with NAVER Corp, Korea's leading...
16/12/2025
2025 Wrapped arrived bigger and bolder than ever. This year's experience is designed to be ultra personal and shareable, with new features like Wrapped Part...
16/12/2025
Three 12-kilowatt Advanced Electric Propulsion System thrusters, supplied by L3Harris Technologies, form the core of Gateway's propulsion system. Pictured i...
16/12/2025
The challenge facing America's defense industrial base is not just about speed - its about rebuilding the foundation that makes speed possible. Our nations ...
16/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
16/12/2025
SEVILLE, Spain Canal Sur, the public broadcasting service for Andalusia, Spain, has completed a total technology refresh based on Pebble's resilient, softwa...
16/12/2025
NEW YORK Teleprompting hardware provider Telescript International has acquired all software code and intellectual property previously owned by Telescript West. ...
16/12/2025
As cable operators face increased competition from 5G fixed wireless access providers, a new report from Ookla Research finds that T-Mobile is the FWA speed lea...
16/12/2025
Apple has announced a major upgrade to the Apple TV app for device owners outside the Apple ecosystem with news that the Apple TV app for Android now supports G...
16/12/2025
Space42 grows Direct-to-Device partner ecosystem through a Memorandum of Underst...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON Announces Release Date for Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 R...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON's Kyivstar Invests in Renewable Energy in Ukraine with Acq...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Emma Appleton, Fares Fares, Frida Gustavsson and Jakob Oftebro...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Docu-reality My Korean Boyfriend Gets a Trailer and Premiere D...
16/12/2025
Harmonic's XOS Advanced Media Processor Improves Streaming Video Quality and Boosts Viewer Engagement SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dec. 16, 2025 - Harmonic (NASDAQ: ...
16/12/2025
RT Sport Awards 2025 live on RT One and RT Player at 8:05pm on Saturday 20 December.
On Saturday 20 December live on RT One and RT Player at the earlier t...
16/12/2025
Singer -songwriter Brian Kennedy has been announced as the final celebrity dance...
15/12/2025
Harlem Globetrotters Celebrate 100th Anniversary With New Brand Campaign From Th...
15/12/2025
Top L-R: La Tierra Del Valor (The Home of the Brave), Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawe...
15/12/2025
L3Harris will leverage 15 years of experience supporting the E-4B Nightwatch and...
15/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the loss of federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and operational changes, the statewide pub...
15/12/2025
BOULDER, Colo. Public Media Venture Group (PMVG), Venture Technologies Group (VTG), and WQED have completed a multipart agreement that they say will significant...
15/12/2025
Cape Town, November 13, 2025 - SES and International artist and humanitarian, Fo...
15/12/2025
Luxembourg, December 15, 2025 - SES, a leading space solutions company, and Abra Group launched fast and reliable multi-orbit inflight connectivity service on t...
15/12/2025
How Rivian s Design Puts Drivers First-And Why That Matters Published on Dec 15, 2025 Categories: Business Solutions
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Sha...
15/12/2025
Space42 and Cobham Satcom completed the full range of advanced terminals for the...
15/12/2025
15 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan Delivers First Starlink Direct to Cel...
15/12/2025
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor finds himself the topic of year's cracker jokes
Oasis, David Harbour, Celebrity Traitors and Angela Rayner all feature in this y...
15/12/2025
Comscore Expands Cross-Platform Campaign Measurement to Include Audio and Social New capabilities strengthen cross-platform campaign reporting suite; CCR rebran...
15/12/2025
NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD - the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) ...
15/12/2025
RT .ie has reached one billion page views this year and is on track to finish 2025 2% ahead of last year. Average time spent on the site is up 3% on 2024, with ...
15/12/2025
Modern workflows showcase the endless possibilities of generative and agentic AI on PCs.
Of many, some examples include tuning a chatbot to handle product-supp...
13/12/2025
Powering Client Growth: Horizon Deepens Nielsen Partnership, Enabling More Effic...
13/12/2025
In a move that will help it offer more flexible and less costly programming options, YouTube TV has announced that it will be launching YouTube TV Plans with mo...
13/12/2025
SINGAPORE Magna Systems has designed, built and completed what is believed to be the first full UHD and IP-based OB truck in Southeast Asia for a Singapore medi...
12/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Everything You Need to Know for Next Week's Big Sho...
12/12/2025
Hailey Gates at the Atropia premiere (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)...
12/12/2025
Last month, Spotify announced a new collaboration with the ATP Tour, the global governing body of men's professional tennis, aimed at bringing the next gene...
12/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the elimination of Federal federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and changes in the way they...
12/12/2025
Wisycom and DPA Microphones announce the appointment of Ren Moerch as Group Product Director, Wireless, a strategic leadership role that will guide the combine...
12/12/2025
SMPTE , the home of media professionals, technologists, and engineers, in conjuncture with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the Entertainment Technolog...
12/12/2025
Keepit, the vendor-independent, cloud-native data protection provider, today announced a strategic go-to-market relationship in Poland with Ingram Micro, a lead...
12/12/2025
Atomos announced the immediate availability of a new firmware update for its Ninja TX GO and Ninja TX monitor-recorders, unlocking Open Gate 48P RAW recording w...
12/12/2025
Professional Wireless Systems (PWS) once again played a critical role in delivering flawless wireless coordination and support at the 2025 Latin Grammy Awards a...
12/12/2025
The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), together with the Video Services Forum (VSF), the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) and the European Broadc...
12/12/2025
DHD audio will demonstrate the latest additions to its range of digital audio production solutions on Booth 321 in Hall B6 at Hamburg Open 2026. The show will b...
12/12/2025
Chaos today announces the release of V-Ray for Blender, update 2, bringing its award-winning rendering technology to even more Blender users by adding support f...
12/12/2025
Lighting specialist UltraLEDs has launched Precision LED Tape, a high-CRI lighting solution designed specifically for professional film, TV, and studio use.
P...
SportTech 2019: Embracing football fan culture with COPA90 By Will Strauss, Editor 
