OneFootball Acquires Dugout – Reshaping Football’s Digital Media Landscape

Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Olympique de Marseille all welcomed as OneFootball shareholders 

OneFootball, the leading football media platform, has today acquired Dugout to reshape the football digital media landscape and form the world’s largest owned and operated digital football media business.*  

The acquisition will put fans at the heart of the football ecosystem. It will bring Dugout’s global video expertise, network and distribution to OneFootball, uniting the businesses to create the most comprehensive content offering. This includes live OTT streaming, highlights, behind-the-scenes and archive video content, news, scores and statistics.  

OneFootball’s shareholders will now include Dugout founding clubs – Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid – as well as new shareholder Olympique de Marseille.

The business will have an unparalleled reach and engagement. OneFootball’s personalized digital experience will be enhanced by Dugout’s suite of products and platforms, including its network of 110+ premium publishers, to now reach more than 85 million monthly active users, globally. 

Combining the businesses will bring benefits for the whole football ecosystem and create new opportunities to monetize OneFootball‘s specialist digital football offering: 

  • Clubs, leagues and federations will benefit from increased global audience reach, data insights and a better understanding of their fans’ engagement, creating new and exciting direct-to-consumer and monetization opportunities 
  • Premium publishers will benefit from access to professionally produced, highly engaging and exclusive video content, delivered via a plug and play embed solution to complement their editorial
  • For brands and advertisers, aggregating OneFootball’s first party fan data with Dugout’s unique fan profiling platform, FanPro™, will deepen audience understanding and increase targeting options through audience segmentation across the new platforms and global publisher network
  • Most importantly, fans will benefit from a complete, accessible and flexible offering, with instant access to original and highly relevant content including live and archive footage, breaking news, scores, analysis, insights and features.  More football will be more accessible to more fans around the world, anywhere, anytime, as a personalised experience.

Lucas von Cranach, CEO and founder of OneFootball, explains: 

“Since forming OneFootball, our ambition has been to become the ultimate destination for everything football, both on and off the pitch, and our acquisition of Dugout reflects this. This move will benefit the whole football ecosystem with clubs, federations and leagues able to increase audience reach and harness our powerful data insights to gain a deeper understanding of their fans’ engagement. Our brand and advertising partners will have access to new, contextually-relevant destinations to reach highly engaged football fans on a global scale, with a local approach. 

“Welcoming 10 of the world’s biggest football clubs as shareholders is a special occasion and we will be working closely alongside them, and OneFootball‘s existing shareholders, to create exciting direct-to-consumer opportunities. 

“We will continue to provide a fan-first digital experience, with an enhanced content offering that is complete, accessible and flexible.”

Elliot Richardson, Chairman of Dugout, said: 

“Over the past 4 years we have delivered a number of industry transformational initiatives, with a single goal, that through collaboration we can deliver value to Clubs, Publishers, Brands and Fans via our truly unique company. Thanks to the hard work, ambition and commitment of our wonderful team and incredible support from all our shareholders, we have evolved Dugout into a highly influential, successful business, and built deep long-lasting relationships with our partner clubs, federations, leagues, sponsors, advertisers and publishers that is impossible to replicate.

OneFootball acquiring Dugout brings together two great, complementary businesses with the most talented people in the industry and establishes the world’s largest B2B and B2C football media company. The newly combined business is now in a strong position to accelerate expansion and support our partners through the rapidly changing digitalfootball landscape.

“The entire football ecosystem will benefit from this deal at a time when it is so important for everybody and will help define the future together working with a common purpose.”

* The completion of this acquisition is subject to certain customary authorisations. It is currently anticipated that the transaction will be completed in the beginning of the year 2021.

ABOUT ONEFOOTBALL

OneFootball’s goal is to fuel the world’s football obsession. Reaching tens of millions of football fans worldwide every month, across its platform and social media channels, OneFootball is the most popular football media platform for the new generation of football fans. It is the only app with a fully personalised home stream for non-stop news of your favourite club and the only company to offer single live football matches in-app on a free and pay-per-view basis. In the spirit that football is more than just 90 minutes, OneFootball operates a 24-hour newsroom to provide fans across the world with the comprehensive football content they crave – from statistics and live scores of 200+ leagues and competitions worldwide to breaking news, highlight clips, live streaming, transfer rumours and features. Native integration from OneFootball’s network of over 300 independent content creators, clubs, federations and broadcasters adds an additional 25,000+ pieces of content per week. OneFootball is available in 12 languages and is the best rated sports app in the world, based on millions of App Store and Google Play reviews. Founded twelve years ago, the company has its headquarters in Berlin and regional offices in London, New York, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. For more information, please visit:

ABOUT DUGOUT 

Dugout is a unique digital media company co-owned by 10 of the world’s biggest football clubs.

Since launching in 2016 with Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid there are now 120+ clubs, National Football Federations and Leagues in partnership with Dugout. This collaboration helps football clubs educate, engage and grow their digital fanbase via a premium global publisher network.

Using current and archived footage, Dugout creates and distributes over 3,500 brand safe, professional videos delivering 400 million views globally a month and growing. 

Visit Dugout.com and Dugoutworldwide.com (corporate site) for more information and download the app here: dugout.com/download-app

Engage with Dugout on social:

https://twitter.com/dugout [content]

https://twitter.com/dugoutcorporate [corporate]

https://www.linkedin.com/company/dugout-ltd/ 

https://www.facebook.com/officialdugout/ 

https://www.instagram.com/officialdugout/

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