Juventus has unveiled the next chapter of Juventus Forward, the innovation platform first launched in 2024. On Wednesday, Juventus hosted a new event, “Forward. In Play – Innovation Takes the Field,” to introduce a pair of partnerships with CDP Venture Capital and The Players Fund, as well as a debut cohort of startups that will support Juventus across athlete development, guest management and content production functions.
Carolina Chiappero, Juventus’ innovation manager, emceed the event at Allianz Stadium, which featured the club’s new partners and speakers including Juventus Director of Football Strategy Giorgio Chiellini, UEFA’s Charles Frémont and Paris 2024 innovation head Omar El Zayat.
Allianz Stadium will now effectively serve as a testing ground for the newly formed “Forward Squad,” a cohort of 11 global startups:
Athlete development tech providers:
- SPORTHYPE
- i-BrainTech
- Soccerment
- DHTA Sports
Biomechanics and motion analysis firms:
AI-powered translation and audio localization startups:
- Lingopal
- YouDub Studio
- PROFOUND
Guest management platform:
Carolina Chiappero, Juventus’ innovation manager, said the team is hoping those early-stage companies will help solve for specific challenges, like providing more seamless translation functions for its content production arm. Juventus will not make investments in the chosen startups, though Chiappero suggested the club is open to modifying the program in the future.
“It’s a win-win deal, where startups provide services and we provide validation, access and visibility,” Chiappero told SBJ. “The idea is to start looking inside the venture world to understand how it works. We do not know where this journey is going to lead us, but in order to make important choices, you need to learn the environment. … We’ll see in the coming years if there’s a space for us to evolve even more in this direction.”
Chiappero added that the goal will be for some of the chosen companies to eventually become full-time suppliers of the club, and that Juventus will annually select a new “team” of 11 startups moving forward.
CDP, an Italian VC fund, will relocate its sports tech and wellness accelerator from Rome to Turin as part of its work with Juventus. The Players Fund, the athlete-backed investment and advisory firm based in the U.K., will meanwhile lead a global search for potential further venture partners for Juventus. Andy Marston, The Players Fund’s head of corporate venture, described the effort as a rare initiative within sports.
“There’s not usually the resources in-house, within teams, to have the luxury to be like, ‘Let’s go proactively find stuff that could make us better,’” Marston said. “It’s usually reacting to the fact that something’s gone wrong.”
Marston added that The Players Fund will have a fairly flexible mandate as it collaborates with Juventus across the next three years: “There is an opportunity for us to either introduce companies we’ve invested in because we believe in them or invest in stuff that we first encounter through this program. But it’s not a specific mandate for that to be the case.”
The Players Fund also recently partnered with Serie A club Como 1907 to launch a new accelerator program.
