Footballco is targeting $100m (about £76m) in revenue for the World Cup year in 2026 as affiliates and sponsored content on Youtube are currently “huge revenue growth drivers”.
This is despite a hit to traffic this year at Footballco’s biggest website Goal as a result of Google’s AI Overviews sharing information at the top of search results so that fewer people feel they need to click through to the original publisher.
Monthly visits to goal.com have been hovering at 62-63 million since July, compared to an average of 90 million across 2024. In September, visits were down 27% year on year.
Footballco chief executive Juan Delgado told Press Gazette he believed, however, that Goal has been hit less than many other brands because most of its audience still comes on match day ahead of, during or after a game.
“The LLMs [large language models] don’t have that level of real-time information coverage yet.”
Not all Footballco websites have seen a traffic drop: for example, Arabic-language brand Kooora, the company’s second-biggest site with around 40 million visits in September, has seen less of an impact because its direct traffic is much higher at 60% compared to around 40% for Goal.
Other brands at the publisher such as Calciomercato (Italian), Spox (German) and Voetbalzone (Dutch) have a similar traffic referral mix to Kooora, Delgado added.
The percentage drop at Goal was likely amplified by the effect of the Euros last year boosting the audience for several months, as demonstrated by the 2024 peak of 108.5 million visits in July and 103.3 million in June.
The women’s Euros tournament this year did not have the same impact on traffic as that, “as much as we would like it to be super successful”, Delgado said.
However, Delgado said, time spent on the Goal website has increased “substantially” even as page views decreased, mitigating the impact to programmatic advertising.
One of the contributors to time on site increasing, he said, is an answer engine trained on Goal’s content called Goal-e, which uses technology from Miso Technologies.
It suggests questions, such as “What has been Omar Marmoush’s impact since returning from injury?”, which opens a new page to give a chatbot-style answer.
He said this has helped mean that revenue has not seen the same sort of percentage drop that traffic has.
Also helping is massive revenue growth in affiliate sales, with links to direct people to do things like sign up to watch a game on services like Sky Sports or buy match tickets, including at the last minute through Stubhub.
Betting has become a “decent chunk” of Footballco’s affiliate revenue, Delgado said. Tickets and travel have also seen a boost for people visiting new places for a match.
He said Footballco’s affiliate business will bring in about $13m (£11.5m) in 2025. “Four years ago it was zero, and three years ago it was single, low digit millions. And so it’s grown quite a bit…
“So even though we have had a dip in traded media over the course of the last few months, the pickup in affiliate has more than covered that.”
Delgado explained that SEO-driven articles that contain a lot of affiliate links, for example match previews, are now largely automated. For example, AI can help to fill in the latest team line-up.
“Google can rank you higher because you have those updated stats, data points, then you’re going to do better. Hence, that’s where our focus is, in populating all this stuff. All of this stuff is automated now.”
He said these articles were “created by a human a year or two ago, are still being curated by humans” but that the information within them is “mostly AI driven”.
“And so whereas we used to have a team of dozens of people creating all this content from streaming through to shopping or anything like that, we now use AI to power it.”
Despite this Delgado said Footballco is “yet to fire the first person because of AI”. He said those writers are now “doing more content” instead.
“We’ve grown our output, not necessarily shrunk it, but where we have focused our efforts is on creating content that ultimately still drives traffic,” he said. “Hence my starting point of it’s game day action, rather than anything that’s evergreen content.
“We used to win at searches like, you know, ‘which are the most valuable cars that Ronaldo owns?’. Obviously now ChatGPT and Gemini just give you an answer upfront, probably using our IP, and therefore we’ve chosen to stop trying to win at that game which is only going to lead one way, and aiming to win at this type of stuff, which is what drives the business now.”
Footballco using profits to invest in video
Delgado believes that next year, with the World Cup being hosted in the US, Footballco’s total revenue will cross $100m (about £76m) for the first time. He shared figures with Press Gazette in US dollars although the company files its accounts at UK Companies House.
Last year Footballco grew revenue by 12% year on year to $64m (£48.7m) in a year that included the Euros. “Albeit, Euros is not a huge commercial success for us, mostly audience,” Delgado said.
This year Footballco is tracking to be in the mid $70m range (around £57.1m). And Delgado continued: “The plan is for us to do well north of $100m next year.”
Footballco was formed by spinning Goal and other brands out from DAZN in 2020 with backing from private equity firm TPG Capital.
Since then it has been profitable every year except in 2023, when Delgado said they “started making a lot of these investments, and unfortunately, specifically, the UK market wasn’t as strong as it is now, and we took a small loss, single digit million loss.
“From then on, we have been profitable, but most of that growth that we’ve seen on revenue we have ploughed back into the business…”
The “growth lever” in which Footballco has been investing in this year, with more expected to follow in 2026, is video and creating personality-led, athlete-driven shows.
Delgado cited Youtube-based shows including Beast Mode On, hosted by former Wycombe Wanderers striker Adebayo Akinfenwa, and creator-led game show Goal’s Front Three and its US version Goal’s The Rondo.
The shows are also clipped up and packaged for vertical video platforms like Instagram and Tiktok.
Delgado said they are doubling down on shows that are “more global in nature, probably more linked to off the pitch discussions, lifestyle, culture, music, stuff like that, than what Gary Lineker would do at The Rest is Football, or Gary Neville would do at The Overlap.
“It’s more sort of moving outside of the core football space…”
Delgado said monetising this type of content, for example with sponsorship from Soccer Manager on a Goal’s Front Three video featuring Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta playing noughts and crosses, is “the biggest part of our growth now”.
Delgado cited women’s football brand Indivisa, which launched in 2022 and has its own identity but is hosted on the Goal website, saying it has diversified Footballco’s branded content possibilities by working with clients like Elf Cosmetics.
“In this type of content, you could create it with men’s football, and I’m sure people would be interested. But in women’s everybody wants to hear, you know, what England footballers Ella Toone and Alessia Russo are carrying their kit bag.”
Footballco has also been doubling down on video content through acquisition, buying both Soccer Girl and animation brand 442oons this year.
When the business left DAZN in 2020, Delgado said, branded content was bringing in less than $10m (£7.6m). That has now surpassed $40m (£30.5m).
Although Youtube, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, and Snap deliver advertising revenue for the more than one billion monthly video views Footballco generates each month, they collectively makes up less than a tenth of the company’s total video revenue.
[Read more: Publishers ‘should be making £1m a year’ from a successful Youtube channel]
In total 50% of Footballco’s business is in Europe, led by the UK. Its second biggest market is the Middle East, with about 25% of revenue, followed by North America (dominated by the US) and then North Asia (mainly Japan and Korea).
Footballco prepares for World Cup 2026
Investment has been going into building a US business ahead of the World Cup, starting around January 2024 when Jason Wagenheim became Footballco’s first CEO for North America. The team in New York is now about 30 people and most of the growth is coming from branded/sponsored content.
Before this, Footballco was only generating programmatic advertising revenue linked to Goal’s traffic in the US.
This means it has gone from low single digit millions three years ago to “well north of $10m a year now, and should continue to grow, hopefully healthily over the next nine months as the World Cup rolls around, and from then on,” Delgado said.
He revealed Footballco is currently making more money in terms of direct revenue out of women’s soccer in the US than it is from men’s, with Indivisa bringing in almost $7m this year. “A lot of it is linked to the US, the success of our team in New York cracking other categories that we weren’t addressing before, like cosmetics.”
There is also less competition for women’s soccer, he added, demonstrated by his belief that between Indivisa and Soccer Girl Footballco has “the biggest women’s football social business globally” even though it is still in the single-digit millions of followers.
In 2022 Footballco generated $20m (£15.2m) in revenue from the Qatar World Cup. Next year, Delgado said, they will “probably” crack $30m (£22.8m) and he hopes they can reach $40m (£30.5m).
They are “well into that number already” just from one client. Footballco has already secured the “biggest sponsor brand in the history of this business” for the World Cup. Delgado could not name them but said it is a FIFA sponsor.
“That, coupled with the fact that there are more brands than anywhere else in the planet in the US, the amount of money that they usually spend in advertising, meaning the US being the biggest media market in the world, I think will mean that we’re going to have a very successful World Cup.”
He accepts that there will likely be a downward year-on-year trend for the business in 2027, as there was in 2022 to 2023, but noted there was bigger growth in 2024 than the previous drop and that there has been growth again this year. “So we kept some of that organic growth” following the last World Cup, he said.
“We always put up a high-water mark in a World Cup year, but we eventually end up surpassing it… This year we’re already beating the number that we did in 2022.”
‘Proof point is good’ on consumer sales with King Gizzy football shirts
The other area that Delgado highlighted as a growing area – now more than $10m (£7.6m) a year – is direct to consumer sales, which includes a new revenue stream of limited edition clothing collaborations.
This works by “leveraging the pedigree” of brands like Goal but especially subscriptions-based brand Mundial, he said.
For example Mundial has released a football jersey with hip hop duo Outkast, priced at £65, to mark the 25th anniversary of their album Stankonia. The brand also made a football shirt with rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard which sold out stock of tens of thousands of items online in four minutes.
Delgado said: “It’s still early days. We’re not doing millions of dollars on this just yet, but the proof point is good…
“I do think that we have a chance to make that as successful [as affiliate], mostly linked to the fact that even though we may be doing a little bit less traffic…
“Our brand, our IP matters a lot, especially to football fans in certain geographies, and therefore anything that we suggest is authentic and has a story like this one with King Gizzy – they’ll tend to whip out their wallet, and trust us in buying that product.”
Delgado said that by building up these new revenue sources “all we’re trying to do is build as big surface as we can”.
“The wave of the World Cup should hopefully raise all boats, including our competitors, but at the end of the day, when the wave subsides a little bit we’ll be higher than we’ve been before the whole wave came in.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
