September the 7th, 2023 – The Croatian Sofascore company is set to remain a domestic enterprise, and it now has the Asian market in its sights.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, rapid digitisation has made sport, especially the most followed types, totally global. Today it’s of course totally possible to check every result in real time.
Moreover, current and historical statistics about players, clubs, national teams, coaches and everything else, once difficult to access, expensive, incomplete and deficient by all criteria, are now mostly free and available to anyone with a mobile phone, anywhere in the world.
Most often, this type of information is also translated and totally localised to the given user’s language. In this segment, Croatia also has a lot to boast about. The Croatian Sofascore is currently among the most important global companies for sports statistics.
The Croatian Sofascore is aiming high
As Ivan Bešlić, the chief operating officer (COO) and co-founder of the company explains, the Croatian Sofascore platform will very soon become a place where you can find any result from any sport that is officially followed in the world.
“When we started Sofascore, our main focus was to make something better than what existed on the market before. I’d go as far as to say that, although we’re extremely satisfied with the quality of the product we currently have, we’re still working on improving it every single day and trying to make something better, different and more modern. That is something that is expected on the market in 2023,” explained Bešlić, adding that it is a big challenge to gather all the results of all sports in one place, but that they see it as a realistic goal regardless.
“We can see that there’s a need for it. Currently, many results are shared via WhatsApp or on social media platforms such as Facebook, and certain types of software only exist for certain leagues and for certain countries. Our project, called Sofascore Editor, is already very popular. Many users want to enter the results of local clubs, and parents want to enter the results of the sports played by their children. Our estimate is that by the end of the decade, the results of all kinds of sports could be in one place – on Sofascore.
Our teams are growing rapidly and we have plans for further recruitment. We already have offices located in Zagreb, Mostar, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. Our future plans are focused on the Asian market. Of course, we’re not going to be stopping there either, and we will certainly have several offices around the world that will help us in collecting all these results”, stated Bešlić.
They pointed out from the Croatian Sofascore that their main users are fans of sport who want to know much more about the match than just the result. They want to know who the best players are, to see who is good and who might need to be replaced live. They want to find out how a certain club has performed on the sporting stage throughout history and what status their players are currently at.
All of this means that they cover a very specific niche of those who watch sport through numbers and statistics. This has been popular across the pond in the United States of America for decades now, and here at home in Europe, we’re only now switching to such a model.
Has legalised betting aided in popularity?
When asked how much the increasingly widespread legalised online betting contributes to the popularity of their service, Bešlić pointed out that although, for example, North America is moving towards the legalisation of betting, they have noticed that in the last decade the betting market has become more and more closed off.
“An exception like the USA is understandable if we take into account that they will host the World Cup and that football stars are now penetrating American culture. However, in other regions of the world, such as India, we do see the stronger regulation of the activities of bookmakers,” said Bešlić.
Over 100 leagues
In the world of sport, there is a lot of emotion involved and enormous amounts of money as well, so the question arises how one can remain neutral in such conditions and not succumb to the pressure of the players they evaluate, their managers, their clubs, and of course – the passionate fans themselves. The Croatian Sofascore has said that they are resolute that their ratings are objective and that more than 100 media outlets around the world use them in their respective reporting on various sports.
“Our assessment is completely objective. We don’t have favourites or dislikes. Our ratings are influenced by about a hundred parameters, and the algorithm is constantly being improved. Dissatisfied players often contact us, and we also have situations where certain football managers who are dissatisfied with the performance of their players try to reach our office.
In spite of all of that, we continue to stand behind the fact that the algorithm is identical for more than 100 leagues all over the world,” stated Ivan Bešlić, adding that Sofascore will continue to remain a Croatian company because it has huge potential for development and at the moment there are five major projects active within the product that will significantly change the way we follow sport.
