COPA90 have seen major shift towards fans as content creators – they’ve also developed ‘proprietary fan intelligence’

COPA90 was first set up in 2012 as a reaction to what its founders saw as the loss of football’s soul. Amid spiralling transfer fees, ticket price hikes and fixtures dictated by TV schedules, its goal was to give football fans a voice as their concerns appeared to matter less and less to those running the game.

Nine years on, amid the European Super League fallout and renewed focus on fan involvement, its aims remain as relevant as ever.

Since it was founded the company has evolved to become not only one of football’s leading digital media businesses, but also one of the UK’s fastest growing tech companies. Last year it was listed in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100.

Creating content for a range of clients, including media companies, clubs and brands, its activities act as a barometer of the changing desires and habits of today’s global football fan.

During Euro 2020 the London-based company, which employs a team of 50 people, led on the content production for TikTok – the first digital entertainment platform to partner with the tournament.

COPA90 developed four new formats for the project, including The Flare Button, TikTok’s first-ever live sports show, featuring ex-footballers, musicians, comedians and other guests, designed to provide an alternative to the traditional half-time broadcast show.

"Mind-altering filters"

Speaking to Off The Pitch, Tom Thirlwall, COPA90 co-founder and CEO, points out that many young fans “are certainly more likely to be on TikTok [at half-time] than they are tuning into the wise words of the broadcast panel, so we wanted to create something for them.”

The other new formats were Get to Know, with fans from each of the 24 participating nations sharing thoughts about each team and controversial predictions; Starting XI, designed to encourage the audience to select a series of different starting teams with fun and challenging parameters; and Alt Reality, a scripted comedy blended with “mind-altering filters.”

COPA90 also brought back its Fans Daily format, with 24 creators, one from each competing country, bringing together the top fan moments from across the tournament in 60 seconds.

Barbell strategy

The content attracted 130 million views during the tournament, and COPA90 gained more than 200,000 new followers on TikTok.

Thirlwall believes the partnership illustrated the rapidly growing desire for fan-led short-form content, and observes that “football has become a massive part of TikTok’s engagement and growth strategy.” According to TikTok, there are 100 million people across Europe using the platform to share football experiences every month.

COPA90 has a strong presence on most major social media platforms, particularly YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, and for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia it had a partnership with Snapchat, with the content drawing nearly three quarters of a billion views during the tournament.

However, Thirlwall says the partnership with TikTok for Euro 2020 marked the latest stage of COPA90’s development as it looks to meet the evolving behaviours of football fans, forming part of a “barbell strategy” designed to help it deliver both the short-form and long-form content increasingly in demand.

Exploring Englishness

The company has invested heavily in the production of long-form content ahead of launching COPA90 Studios, a new department led by COO Ross Whittow-Williams making documentaries, films and series on football culture across the world.

So far this year, COPA90 has produced mid-form to long-form documentaries in all six continents, including in the UK, Italy, Portugal, France, Greece, Germany and Norway; Bhutan, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Nepal and China; Nigeria, Algeria and Egypt; Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia and Curacao; Canada; and Australia.

In the run-up to Euro 2020 it also produced a documentary aired on BBC Three featuring the rap duo Krept and Konan, exploring Englishness and creating a football anthem for the Euros, with advice from England players, manager Gareth Southgate and fellow rap artists.

“Then at the other end of the barbell is the inescapable, irrepressible rise of TikTok and short-form content,” says Thirlwall. “So we've really pivoted our business to attend to those two ends of the spectrum around where value is in content at the moment.”

Flipped the model of the business

Alongside this is a growing emphasis on fans as creators, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic and the wider trend of creative dispersion. COPA90 now draws content from over 4,000 fans in 150 countries, described by Thirlwall as “creators, young filmmakers, storytellers.”

He reveals that while prior to the pandemic around 20-30 per cent of the content published by COPA90 was created by these fans, “lockdown very much flipped the model of the business, and 95 per cent of our content is now being curated and really handed over in terms of its making and storytelling to this dispersed creator workforce that we have around the world.”

Last year this led to films exploring how football is helping tackle teenage depression in the Arctic Circle, for instance, and another telling the story of a transgender football team in Mexico City.

Examples also include the award-winning and Oscar-nominated short film Nefta Football Club. Created by the French filmmaker Yves Piat, it tells the story of two football fan brothers who bump into a donkey lost in the middle of the desert in the south of Tunisia, on the border of Algeria.

Thirlwall says that while producing this type of content helps COPA90 achieve its mission of giving a diverse array of global fans a voice it is also leading to a growing range of commercial opportunities as both clubs and brands increasingly look to leverage the power of football to position themselves as drivers of positive change.

Record first-half results

For instance, the company has produced films and other content for Adidas’ partnership with the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, as well as the Monster Kickabout initiative designed to boost football participation among children in the UK, part of the new Just A Game!? campaign from Sports Direct.

Other projects include a collaboration with EA Sports offering a paid internship programme at COPA90 to five applicants from Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME) and other under-represented communities in the media industry. The programme, which began in June and lasts for three months, aims to build on COPA90’s Beat The Bias campaign for EA Sports launched last year.

Thirlwall observes that “it’s good for us that our purpose now aligns so well with our commercial model, which hasn't always been the case, as it's been quite difficult to marry those two things.”

He reveals that this shift – along with some financial and operational changes made in the wake of the pandemic – has this year helped deliver record first-half results.

Investing in insight

As it looks to capitalise on this growth, COPA90 is also planning to expand the range of insight it provides to clubs and brands on fan behaviours, habits and tastes.

“This is an area we're going to begin to invest in very heavily,” says Thirlwall. He reveals that the company is partnering with the data-driven sports intelligence business Twenty First Group (formerly 21st Club) to develop what he describes as “proprietary fan intelligence.”

This will be delivered via tools similar to those which Twenty First Group has developed to measure value in the transfer market, as well as sponsorship and sports rights, and will build on the other types of research COPA90 already carries out.

“Our strategy and insights team is constantly garnering data across all of our social and campaign interactions, and also carrying out more bespoke qualitative studies of fans wherever they are in the world,” Thirlwall explains.

These include ‘City Digs’ to gain deep insights on fans of a particular club. “For these studies we'll go and literally live with football fans of those clubs in their cities and embed ourselves with them,” says Thirlwall. “It’s really about creating very three-dimensional models of fan behaviour.”

COPA90 has carried out City Digs for Premier League clubs including Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur. Other examples include a three-week study in Charlotte, North Carolina, examining football culture in the city prior to the launch of its new MLS franchise Charlotte FC next year.

Insights gathered for COPA90’s brand partners are designed to help them understand the fan bases of teams they're sponsoring. Work for Nike, for instance, includes research on what it means to be a Liverpool fan, carried out on Merseyside, as well as in China, the Middle East and the USA.

Fan tokens to be next major trend

COPA90’s Modern Fan Report details some of its key findings. Published in 2018 and 2019, the next version will be available in Q4 of this year and will assess what post-Covid fandom looks like and how it is set to evolve over the next five years.

Thirlwall predicts that during this period fans across the world will continue to embrace new ways of engaging with their clubs as the digital shift accelerated by Covid continues, in particular through the use of fan tokens.

“I think the adoption of digital NFTs [non-fungible tokens], where fans have new experiences and interactions with their clubs and players, is going to be the single biggest experience that you'll see over the next few years,” he says.

He also anticipates the growing interest in lower-league and grassroots football will continue, following the ESL fallout and inability to attend matches due to the pandemic.

“I think we’re going to see a resurgence in people wanting to have the kind of true fan experiences they've been deprived of,” he says. “And those experiences will be across the tiers of football. We’re seeing a lot of creativity and an expansion of ideas in how to engage fans at every level of the game.”