THE TOUCHLINETECH STORY
In 2017 I volunteered to run my local football club, Central Ajax in Warwick.
Ajax was a club that I had played for since the age of 11 with my best friend, Matt. And after we had both been to University we went back to the club and coached there together. However, the club had started to struggle and just before Matt died from cancer in 2016, I made him a promise that I would go back to the club to try and ensure its survival.
The club had always a been a boys’ club, however there was no men’s team which meant that there was no pathway for young players – forcing them to leave the club they had grown up at when they finished playing at U18.
I wanted to grow the number of teams and diversify the club, so I introduced girls football and a men’s team, as well as bringing in a coaching company to run Saturday sessions and securing new sponsors and suppliers across the whole club.
Setting up a men’s team was expensive – the fee to join the league was £2500 and we didn’t have that amount of money. I didn’t think it was right for the junior teams to subsidise the men’s team and so we needed to find another way of raising the money.
Initially I approached local businesses to see if they would pay to have an advertising board around the perimeter of the pitch, however most of them felt that they wouldn’t get any return on their investment – if they were lucky their board might appear in the background of a photograph in the local paper – and they declined to sponsor us.
I had an idea to replicate what the Premier League teams were doing at the time and create individual player graphics that we could add sponsor logos to and then share via social media. Local businesses loved the idea and agreed to sponsor players for £100 for the season – 20 players found sponsors and, together with a couple of team sponsors we managed to raise the £2500 we needed.
We created player graphics with sponsor names and logos and then tweeted these out via the clubs Twitter account during matches if a player scored, for example, or saved a penalty or won Man of the Match. It was great for the club who managed to raise the money quickly without having to be subsidised by the junior teams, it was great for the players who loved having their own professional looking graphic on the teams Twitter, and it was great for the sponsors who reached a new audience and got great value from a small outlay. As a result our Twitter following grew from 40 to over 1000 in a few months.
The only problem was that it was difficult trying to provide match commentary, typing tweets out with cold fingers and having to manually upload the graphics from the camera roll, all whilst trying to coach the team!
I looked for a solution that would make this process quicker and easier and that would allow me to create content whilst standing on the touchline with professional looking graphics and giving exposure to our sponsors.
I realised that the problem wasn’t unique to Central Ajax and that in addition to helping my own club I could help thousands of teams around the country that were also trying to live score their matches.
When I wasn’t able to find a solution I decided to build one and TouchlineTech was born.
