The social network that wants to unite the football community
What do you get if you let a tech wizard and a football-mad businessman brainstorm together for long enough?
The answer, perhaps not surprisingly in hindsight, is a social media network for football fans. Specifically, TheFutbolApp, the brainchild of American Steve van Zutphen and British-Cypriot George Kafkarou.
News feeds, games, prediction leagues, and chatrooms. Uniquely for social networks, it also looks to share its wealth with its members through its own cryptocurrency, TheFutbolCoin (TFC). The more you engage, the more likes you get, the more you make.
Van Zutphen is a veteran of the tech industry and has had several experiences of creating social networks since the early days of the century.
“It’s really hard to create a social network technically,” he said.
“It’s a lot more difficult than people expect, because of the amount of polish they see on
Instagram and Facebook. They have tens of thousands of technologists as you can imagine. But if you break into a social network, you have to be better than the existing ones, not be equal or lesser.”
It took a long time to perfect an idea which, according to van Zutphen, initially came about after his friend and champion skier Jan Hudec — nicknamed the Panda — had asked him to devise a mechanism in which money can be poured back into the skiing community. And so the tech behind TheFutbolApp was born
“We’re used the advantage of the big technology toolkit we developed over a decade with a really world class team of guys and we felt that the way to get in the market was through sports, as a primary interest base, because we knew that Twitter was riding the coattails of football.”
To what extent football fans flock to Twitter came as shock to van Zutphen, as it might for many people.
“I’ve talked to executives at Twitter, and they said straight to me that of 100 million daily active users (two years ago), 70 million are there primarily because of football. So really Twitter is a football app, it’s football’s Instagram. So we thought that we could field something different and better, maybe to combine the features of these popular networks. We could do it, and we chose football.”
“It wasn’t easy, it’s technically very difficult,” he added. “But we did get it off the ground now and it’s running really beautifully.” TheFutbolApp was launched in 2019 and currently has just over half-a-million active members. The founders where after creating a community that will benefit all its members equally.
“Steve and I and the whole team have a burning desire to make a difference for everybody involved in this community,” Kafkarou said. “The biggest community in the world is football. Everybody is equal, everybody shares the passion.”
The established social media networks are not exactly enjoying positive press these days and Kafkarou is keen to point out how TheFutbolApp will differentiate itself from the pack.
“One of the benefits of the TFC, the token, is that it’s a mechanism for us to share the wealth of advertising in football with our users,” he said.
“As opposed to Facebook and Twitter who keep all their revenue, our approach is to share it with the community.”
This holistic mindset can benefit all partners he says, including football clubs, whose finances, shoddy at the best of times, have been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The most important stakeholder, however, is always the individual fan.
“We (TheFutbolApp) are closer to the fans of any club than the clubs themselves and that will continue to grow,” he added.
“We’re growing without any promotional activities at eight percent per month in terms of users. And we’ve barely warmed up, there are many more things to come.” Having held an executive position at a Fortune 500 company in New York, Kafkarou says it would have been easy for him and his partner to conceive of other money-making ideas.