Whole new ball game for Yorkshire sports platform

REVOLUTIONARY sports management platform, Pitchero is celebrating vast growth as the company goes fully mobile and looks to expand its offering outside of the UK.

The Leeds-based company which was founded in 2007, helps over 10,000 grassroots sport clubs to connect with the players and their parents using its dedicated communication space.

Co-founder of Picthero, Mark Fletcher said: “I was at university when Facebook arrived and within four days the entire campus was using it to communicate and chat, it was pretty unbelievable and so the original idea was to create a sports platform that mirrored the same principles as the universal system.

“And over the years it’s evolved to be much more than that and now we’re a really big important part of the clubs. We help the clubs collect payment, manage membership, promote themselves, record all their results, reports, and do all their communications.”

As well as the investment in the mobile platform, the company has also launched Pitchero Play, which allows users to record video footage from the pitch side and instantly upload it to the club website, the mobile app, the league website and even the club’s social media pages. Mark added: “So by the time the games finished, the players can go back to the changing room and watch all their match highlights straight away.

“It’s a great way of engaging the players, motivating them and encouraging them to come back next week but also they’ll share that with all their friends, people they go to school with, and they’ll see it and they’ll want to be part of those teams and play for those clubs as well.”

With the focus firmly on the mobile platform, the brand soon hopes to enable users to instantly send footage on to local media using Pitchero Play. Pitchero is also working on the mobile content and mobile payment services for its customers.

With the rapid growth of the business in the UK, Pitchero is now looking at expanding internationally and offering platforms for a range of other sports. North American soccer and Australia’s common wealth sports are the next targets for the company.

“We’re in Leeds in the heart of this weird sports-tech bubble that seems to be appearing and its creating a capital in the UK of sports tech and that’s really quite key.

“Our primary goal is to unite the whole of grass root sports onto one single platform, so to dominate that whole grass roots, community sports, anywhere in the world across all sports. So people all over the world will use our technology to communicate, to share a video, to talk about their games, to post a match report, to post a video – that’s all done within the Pitchero network.”