Prematch, a German content and stats app for amateur football players, has raised a €2.4m seed round led by the Schadeberg Family Office. It plans to use the funds to increase user engagement on the platform.
What does Prematch do?
Founded in 2021, Prematch is a content platform for amateur football in Germany — tiers four to twelve in the league system — containing news, statistics and player profiles, including mock transfer values. Founder Lukas Röhle says the startup is creating a “Fifa experience for amateur players”.
The app is free and mostly used by amateur players themselves. The startup says roughly a third of the 1m adult amateur players in Germany have downloaded the app since it launched nationwide in August 2022.
The platform aggregates online news and club posts to gather stats like match results, top goalscorers, assists and squad lists.
And there’s more online news about amateur football than you might think. “There are about 15-20 sources publishing content online about a sixth-tier game in Germany, and we pull that content into the platform,” says Röhle.
Prematch isn’t yet generating any revenue, but it's working on partnerships with a number of brands. Those partnerships could work by brands donating prizes to top-performing teams as a way to engage potential customers. A beer company could give a crate to the team that wins a league, for example, in the hope that the players would then buy from the brand in the future, Röhle says.
What’s next?
While Rohle says that Prematch hopes to roughly double its users by the end of 2023, it’s increasing community engagement that the startup’s really doubling down on over the next year.
To do that, the majority of the funds will be spent on product development, says Röhle. Prematch will also add about five staff to the team of 18, including senior hires in the tech and product teams.
The sports tech market
A number of startups looking to tap into grassroots sports communities have sprung up in recent years. The most well funded is US-based running app giant Strava, which raised a $110m Series F round in 2020. While European startups in the sector haven’t raised anything like those figures, a number have picked up smaller sums.
- Germany’s FatMap, an app that lets skiers plan and share their ski trips, raised $13.3m before being acquired by Strava in January 2023.
- France’s Fanprime, which partners with sports teams to engage fans, has raised $2.2m since launching in 2018.
- Denmark’s Tonsser, which allows youth footballers to track their performance and engage with other players, has raised $10.8m.
- France’s Pandascore, a stats platform for the esports community, has raised $10.6m.
