For sports clubs, the most valuable contribution to a startup may not be cash. It may be access to fans, facilities, data or a route into a new market.
Tottenham Hotspur’s new venture programme, Hotspur Labs, launched last month, starts with a question familiar to corporate venture teams: what can a large organisation offer a young startup company beyond money?
But a football club’s answer can look very different from a conventional corporate venture capital model. Its assets may include a stadium, a global fan base, valuable data and the chance to test a product in a live sporting environment.
The programme was created in collaboration with TPF Labs and is part of a broader effort by The Players Fund, the United Kingdom’s first athlete-led venture capital firm, to help sports organisations work with startups through arrangements that can include services, pilots or sponsorship in exchange for equity.
“With Tottenham, we are having a focus on sponsorship for equity,” says Flora Bell, managing director of TPF Labs (pictured, above). The club is interested in building early relationships with series A and series B companies, with the idea that a startup might become a paying sponsor as it grows. That is a long-term bet, not a quick route to revenue: “this is not one year to the next,” says Bell.
The model rests on a different view of what a sports organisation is.
“A modern sports team has about 10 different companies within it,” Bell says, pointing to the range of operations and assets around a club. A startup may be able to use something the club already has — such as a route to potential customers or a place to test a service — to make its product better or reach its next stage of growth.
“A modern sports team has about 10 different companies within it.”
A ticketing business, for example, might value access to information about the people who attend matches. But the club’s contribution need not be a fit with its core technology stack: some companies may become suppliers; others may benefit from an asset without ever becoming vendors. The arrangement depends on the startup and the club, rather than a standard investment template.
That bespoke approach reflects the origins of The Players Fund. Founded about four years ago by former footballer Fergus Bell and his brother, Ruari Bell, a former rugby player, it began with a problem familiar to many athletes: being presented with investment opportunities without much guidance on how to judge them. The founders became informal advisers to teammates, a “WhatsApp sounding board” for people trying to work out “what a good deal looks like, what a bad deal looks like”.
The Players Fund now runs a £10m generalist fund, with an interest in B2B software and frontier AI. TPF Labs, managed by Fergus and Ruari’s sister Flora, is its corporate venture arm. The two have dedicated teams but share some infrastructure and expertise. The Labs team’s first task with a club is not to pitch investments; it is to understand how the organisation works and where it has problems worth solving.
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“We meet everybody at their level,” says Bell. That can mean speaking with departments including IT, HR and legal, then asking: “what’s your biggest problem day to day?” The answer may have little to do with on-field performance. It might be slow recruitment, internal systems or transport. The team uses those conversations to develop themes for sourcing companies, while also inviting applications from start-ups.
The point is to match a company with something the club can uniquely provide. One example comes from Como 1907, another of TPF Labs’ partners. A Swiss brain-health technology company, Connectome, whose core business was in hospitals, needed data to help develop its product. The resulting agreement involved “750 brain scans of the academy team, the female team, and the male team in exchange for equity”, says Bell. The club could provide a structured setting for scans that would be difficult for a young company to assemble on its own.
TPF Labs is also running an innovation programme called Juventus Forward for Italian football club Juventus, with an initial cohort of startups across areas like gait and motion analysis, football-related wearables, neurological tracking and media technologies.
The team is happy to think flexibly — for example planning a hackathon that would bring together Tottenham Hotspur and the US professional basketball team San Antonio Spurs, reflecting an existing relationship with both teams.
The projects are far removed from the usual image of corporate venture capital: a company investing cash in a startup for financial returns or strategic access. Here, the contribution may be a pilot, a service or a sponsorship platform. The equity is still an investment, but the value exchanged can be an organisation’s existing assets and relationships.
TPF Labs typically works with three to five companies in a club’s annual cohort, a scale intended to be manageable for the partner as well as the programme team. Success may mean a financial return, but it may also lead to a commercial partnership or joint venture. One Como cohort company is now set to launch a joint venture with the club.
For the clubs, the programme is also an education in venture. Building a fund takes capital, time and legal work; TPF Labs presents its three-year “venture readiness” programme as a way to learn the landscape before deciding whether to go further and set up a dedicated investment fund. For startups, meanwhile, sports organisations can offer something a cheque alone cannot.
The question for this model is whether those distinctive assets can move beyond intriguing one-off deals and turn into repeatable, useful partnerships.
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