Meet Fieldoo – the social network for footballers and clubs

Do you ever wonder just how muddy the waters of the world of football transfers are?

Every summer and every January, thousands of players move between football clubs all over the world: some are huge multi-million pound transfers, others involve players moving between small clubs forgotten by all but diehard fans and players’ agents.

It seems that the agents never forget. Whilst, on the surface, it looks like football transfers are a simple process of identifying a player, agreeing a fee with his club and then tempting him with a lucrative contract, we’re also aware that there is a shadier side to transfers, involving agents and financial dealings beyond the obvious. There’s money to be made.

But given we usually know nothing about the shadier sides of these deals, we tend to focus on the simpler explanation. The reality is anything but simple.

Website Fieldoo, however, aims to provide a new approach to transfers, offering players, agents and clubs alike with the opportunity to join up to an online social network. The aim is to make transfer deals more transparent and to create a platform where players and clubs can find each other more easily.

It helps clubs deal with transfers without the need for complicated networks of intermediaries, but it also helps players who have fallen out of that network that surrounds football. Players who don’t have clubs or agents can set up a profile just like anyone else; then they can network and kick-start their careers.

The first reaction might be to wonder why this hasn’t been done already. It is, in essence, professional football’s answer to LinkedIn. The website has dedicated sections for players as well as for agents and clubs themselves, and gives access to trials, a messaging service and the ability to network with people around the world.

“Our mission is to bring transparency to football. The market is broken,” Fieldoo CEO Klemen Hosta told Bleacher Report’s Sam Tighe in an interview.

“[Football] is a very corrupt industry. With player trafficking, all the issues happening on the internet, rogue agents scamming players for money. We are verifying intermediaries, verifying users, providing credible contacts at clubs and educating players about their rights.”

The problem isn’t simply that clubs and players have to go through intermediaries, it’s that those intermediaries are often motivated by personal gain and can use less than legitimate means to push through transfers.

Like most social media platforms these days, verifying the profiles of users adds a credibility to the site that helps with the ‘transparency’ that Fieldoo is aiming for, something that isn’t widespread in the world of footballing transfers.

Fieldoo

“A player who moved from Croatia to Spain had 18 people involved in his transfer, in the chain. Two clubs, one player, 18 people involved? This is the problem. Over €1 million was spent on this transfer, but the actual fee of the player was no more than €300,000.”

It makes sense to use social media in such a way for sports beyond football, too. Although the shady nature of transfer dealings aren’t as big a problem in other sports, the same idea of networking for professionals in order to further their careers can be applied to almost anything: tennis players and golfers to coaches, cyclists to clubs, and non-sporting professions, too.

But we do forget sometimes that social media is still a new phenomenon. Although Twitter and Facebook have been around for over a decade, the idea of using a social media platform to connect with people in your field or area is quite new. Even a decade is hardly a long time.

That explains why the newer platforms still feel a little gimmicky – that there’s maybe a novelty effect to using them that makes them less effective when it comes down to matters of substance.

Finding a match on a dating app, for example, happens after a searching process that doesn’t include all of the criteria that you would usually look for when finding a partner. Similarly with a social network for sportspeople, clubs might like the look of a player’s profile without actually ever having seen him play. In the end ‘matches’ are made on spec, rather than feel.

Fieldoo’s answer is to create events – trials – in order bring agents, players and clubs together physically. Something similar is being advertised by Match.com, bringing single people together for bowling nights in the hope that they might hit it off together.

The risk for Fieldoo, and any potential social network aimed at bringing sportspeople to coaches and clubs, is that it feels like a gimmick or like a dating app. The difference between dating or job-finding sites and sport is that sport isn’t about networking, it’s about quality and excellence.

If you’re a club, networking will expose you to thousands of players, but you can only pick 11. If you’re a player, it’s a similar story. In the end, networking is simply what it sounds like it is: a way to build a network. But the real skill will always be using that network to its fullest.

About author

Chris McMullan
Chris McMullan 831 posts

Chris is a sports journalist and editor of Digital Sport - follow him on Twitter @CJMcMullan_

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