With the FIFA World Cup in the USA, Canada, and Mexico only days away, and two years beyond that, the next Olympic Games in Los Angeles, our recent guest is perfectly placed to guide us through what to expect from the marketing partners of these global events, the biggest in the world, and with a focus on the fan experience.
Sergey Krasotin is a proud-based design director with 12 years’ experience shaping products, brands, and digital experiences that people genuinely enjoy using. He mentors founders and has led design for start-ups that have collectively raised over $1 billion.
Sergey on Start-Ups in Sport:
“Among these start-up companies, many of them, actually don’t really make it. I will say 9 out of 10 start-up companies fail.
And when they fail… by the way, it’s often nothing to do with design, it will be market size, timing, technicalities, it’s not because of doing some bad… bad stuff, but start-up fails, and these people, they… they land somewhere.
And sometimes they go to these big companies, or big sport clubs, big leagues and sport organisations and this is how we ended up working with a lot of these serious, serious, brands. My startup network, I guess, turned into my sport network, but I didn’t really plan it that way.”
Sergey on working with football clubs:
“This is maybe one of the biggest myth busts I’m given when we work with sport companies, or football clubs specifically.
Because, right now, when you reach out to a digital team of a typical football club in the UK, they will benchmark themselves against other clubs. I mean, Arsenal, they look at Chelsea, or Chelsea, they look at Tottenham, and so on, and so on. But no fans on Earth actually do that, right? It doesn’t make any sense. Nobody opens Arsenal application and thinks, like, let me get to the Chelsea application to compare. It doesn’t happen, it’s really strange.
What actually happens is that fans compare your application to apps they have on their phone already. It can be Spotify, Apple Music, Airbnb, Uber, all these normal apps, whatever they use every day.
The digital experience in football clubs is that their audience is getting younger, and it’s getting younger really, really fast.
Sergey on AI:
“The main opportunity right now is how you should operate using all these AI enhancements that are available right now, and we do see huge changes across many, mostly US-based companies, because on the start-up side, we work with companies where a single person, like an AI engineer or design AI engineer, they use these tools like Cloud Code, Google AI, Codex, you name it, like, tens of them, and they’re able to take user feedback, or a request about a certain feature, design this feature, write the code, ship it to the production in a day or two. Like, one single person delivers the whole thing.
And on the club side, it’s completely, completely different. It’s still the old setup.
I mean, here is the design, here is the engineering department, here is the marketing. Yeah I guess maybe there are more departments than web pages sometimes.
That’s I guess, the biggest opportunity. The way a typical digital team at a football club operates, it should be different.
It’s not there yet, based at least on my observations. A couple weeks ago, I’ve been helping one of the Y Combinator startups to hire a designer. And I know for sure that maybe 9 out of 10 US startups, they are completely AI-native.
The people working there are shipping AI automations, they’re wiring up AI agents, they work inside all these LLM tools on a daily basis, and at the same time, I was like, okay, let’s check the UK enterprise site. So I went to all the UK job postings.
For these big companies, and football clubs, and sport organizations, and leagues and almost none of them require AI skills.
So, it’s kind of moving there, but in my humble opinion, it’s not a scientific research, of course, but my impression is that 9 out of 10 jobs at big UK sport companies are the same. They looked 3 or 5 years ago, and it’s a huge gap. It’s, like, 8 or 9 to 1, for a startup versus a UK football club. So, that’s maybe the biggest opportunity right now.