Guest article: Benjamin Penkert is the Founder of SportsTechX and Head of Consulting at the leAD Sports Accelerator in Berlin. You can get in touch via Linkedin, Twitter or email.

It was quite a surprise when the Championship team Leeds United announced their inaugural SportsTech Demo Day. In the past we’ve only seen activities in this area from football clubs who are playing internationally and are amongst the top teams in the top leagues in Europe. But with the support of their payment partner CurrencyTransfer.com they managed to bring a bunch of promising startups to the West Yorkshire region. I was pleased to support with the sourcing and selection of the final companies.

The event took place in the historic Elland Road stadium, which serves the club since it’s foundation in 1919. The day was kicked off by the Managing Director of Leeds United, Angus Kinnear, who welcomed all startups.

And these were the startups who presented themselves in front of the jury (in order of appearance):

Skillcademy360: Fan engagement and fan experience solution to attract new supporters at an early stage and link them up with your club.

Kinexon: Helps to measure, analyze and improve the performance, health & tactics of athletes.

Accredito: Award winning system for all media relations including accreditations and press releases with one, single, verified and global journalists database.

Pernix: Powering on and off-field performance for better talent acquisition, game day outcomes and enhanced spectator experience.

PICO: A first-of-its-kind platform to easily engage fans, effortlessly communicate with them before, during and after your events, and drive revenue through sponsorship and incremental sales.

Zegami: Aunique visual search and analytics platform. It allows users to explore, search, sort, filter, group and analyse large collections of images and data in a simple and intuitive way.

Precision Sports Tech: ASports Medicine and Injury-Analytics technology company that allows sports medicine clinics, centres and institutions to anticipate and reduce the likelihood of re-injury of their clients, whilst also providing an “Engagement Loop”.

Clubtimiser: Awall-to-wall CRM solution for sports clubs developed on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform that helps solving challenges and “pains” experienced by sports clubs regarding value chain management.

The jury assessed the startups upon a variety of criteria, such as Level of Innovation, Maturity of Product, Level of Impact and Customer Demand, and voted for Pernix as the overall winner.

Congrats to Pernix and all participating startups, well done!

And thanks again to Leeds United and CurrencyTransfer.com for the invitation. You really set an example that it’s possible to put together a successful SportsTech event for a club who is not playing internationally or in one of the top league. It just needs some creativity and the help of good partners. Great job!