With the Christmas festivities now a hazy memory, mid-January is a make or break time for those New Year’s resolutions. With the dark mornings and cold nights, it’s not the easiest time of the year to be changing your normal practices, but no one said it would be easy!

Whether that’s giving up vices like junk food or drink, attempting to exercise more or beefing up the contacts book, it’s always hard to get out of a bad routine.

When it comes to the latter, the sports industry has plenty of opportunities to network and find new contacts, but it’s still an often-overlooked tool to grow businesses. Indeed, thinking outside the box when it comes to these new opportunities can be the key to finding the best and most lucrative partnerships.

One London entity set up to help with that is the Corporate 5s Cup, a five-a-side competition for businesses with the aim to facilitate networking for those within the sports industry and beyond. With a focus on bringing professionals from different parts of the sector together to compete, it’s an opportunity to change the setting for a networking day as much as it is a chance to get away from the desk.

“We’ve all been to those standard team building days but that’s not something I particularly enjoy,” says Duncan Scott, Founder of the Corporate 5s Cup, “but I think that sport has the ability to do that on a much higher level.”

Alongside the five-a-side event, skills challenges and Teqball – a table tennis style game played with a football – are incorporated as extra activities alongside stats monitoring and fitness vests which can add to the experience but also serve as ice breakers between players and teams. Touches, passes, completed passes and other stats are recorded.

With categories like business and finance, marketing and PR as well as separate events for different sectors, the participants are relevant, but keeping the categories broad is also a goal.

“It helps us from a recruitment point of view to keep it broad, but networking is quite a key point, and that you’re not just playing football with the companies you work with already because the whole point of it is to meet new people.”

“We’re looking into doing something that enhances the networking side of it a bit more. But what we felt is that, as with the teambuilding side of things, these networking events can feel a bit awkward or forced. Playing sport is a really good ice breaker in itself.”

There is still a line drawn between ‘sport’ and other sectors, and while differentiating in such a way can be helpful, it can also mean that people disregard sectors they don’t think apply to them.

In the end, though, sport is a broad industry with many verticals, lots of which overlap with other sectors and industries. It might be a trendy term, but anything that challenges the siloed nature of many roles within the sports industry and beyond can open up doors many didn’t know even existed.

“We’re looking at doing something afterwards in the evening too, but we’re conscious of making sure it doesn’t feel too forced or like a stereotypical networking event and we want to try and make it feel more relaxed because that’s where the better connections are made.”

“£50 entry fee from each team is put into charity pot, and half of that is split between our charities – which are the Bradley Lowry Foundation and Mind – and the other half is given the to nominated charity of the winners of each team, which is a nice way for businesses to give back as well.”

Making new connections in the sports world is a goal for many in 2019. Whether it’s discovering new products to help streamline workflows and transform your business or whether it’s to keep an eye out for the next big partnership, anything that makes it easier to meet people who could be relevant makes life that bit more simple.