SuperOne enters the football space, Learning from FIFA (the game) and its market domination:

When one of the best-known football media brands embarked on an in-depth investigation into football fandom in 2018, it was probably shocked by its own findings. Andreas Christensen, the Founder of SuperOne saw this discovery as a massive opportunity.

London-based Copa 90 was originally purely a YouTube channel. It has since branched out into a multimedia enterprise encompassing everything from transfer rumors to documentary making. It has close to two million subscribers.

It has time and budget to examine football in granular detail. It assigned a crack team to produce a research study called “The Modern Football Fan. WHAT MAKES THEM TICK? An exploration of their behaviors, their values, their motivations.” Released as a 43-page media-rich PDF, the published result is based on a survey of young football fans.

And it found 80% of them were interested in gaming, topping a list of secondary interests including music, technology, film, travel, and various other named sports.

Gaming: A bigger influence than football itself

Copa90 concluded: “Gaming has provided them with an education — creating a new fan perspective that blurs the line between reality and virtual, and between the local, national and international game.” The reality is that gaming — and in this context, we are mostly talking about the hugely successful behemoth that is FIFA (by EA Sports) — is now a bigger influence on young people’s appreciation of football than actually playing the game.

Perhaps this can be reflected on, with an element of sadness from older folk, but the evidence is clear. Gaming’s strengths over the real physical activity of football are:

• Inclusivity (it doesn’t eliminate players based on athletic ability)
• Accessibility (it doesn’t rely on the availability of other players or pitches)
• Adaptability (it can be played alone or with friends)

Copa90 correctly foresaw that in 2018 Netflix and Amazon were ready to muscle in on the increasingly fragmented world of digital streaming distribution. Among its other predictions were that “new behaviors and innovations in gaming and music will affect football content in the future.”

SuperOne: The game within the game

Andreas Christensen realized that this was extremely good news for SuperOne, which is offering exactly that: an innovation involving gaming and football.

The sport immortalized by Pele, Maradona, and Cruyff — with contemporary superstars every bit as good as them in Messi and Ronaldo — will take a prominent role within the SuperOne game. It will be distributed and shared through fans’ forums, and within those forums, rivalries will be quickly established. The game will be avidly downloaded.

Results will be shared virally. Reigning champions will be dethroned. The game within the game will go viral. The idea is that although FIFA has become the number one football game by its brilliant replication of the game itself, SuperOne can be its upstart younger brother, plowing a different furrow.

So, what does FIFA do particularly well? Mainly, the following:

• Some of the most popular YouTube influencers creating FIFA-specific content A near-perfect reproduction of grounds, players, and visual effects.
• Around 200 million virtual games are played around the world every Sunday.
• Around 68% of 16–19-year-olds play football compared to 74% who play FIFA.

And as an entry point to the game itself, FIFA can point to the fact that two-thirds of avid Major League Soccer fans in the United States identified it as the first thing that got them interested in the sport.

An audience of over two billion

Can SuperOne be as big a deal as FIFA? In terms of a slick, visual display, undoubtedly. In terms of gaining influencers, yes: this is already an area of exploration. In terms of widespread usage, yes. SuperOne’s target is a global audience of two billion people.

Crucially, it is not trying to steal the same demographic or enter the same saturated space. SuperOne is a knowledge-based game, and its chief objective is to snare a slightly older generation than the FIFA crowd.

But let’s sign off this piece with a look at one final Copa90 prediction:

“The blurring of gaming and real-life with just one football. Brands will exist in games or advertise real-life products through gaming characters. Films will spin out of games; players will weave in and out. It will be increasingly difficult to tell the difference.”

Prescient words? Andreas Christensen believes so, and SuperOne is just getting started, creating the Future Today.