Together, the companies provide OTT streaming, highlights, behind-the-scenes and archive video football content, news, scores and statistics.
Football media specialist OneFootball has acquired football content platform Dugout to form what it says is the world’s largest owned and operated digital football media business.
Together the businesses offer live OTT streaming, highlights, behind-the-scenes and archive video content, news, scores and statistics.
Following the acquisition, OneFootball’s shareholders will include Dugout founding clubs – Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid – as well as new shareholder Olympique de Marseille.
OneFootball’s offering will be enhanced by Dugout’s network of 110+ premium publishers, to now reach more than 85 million monthly active users, globally.
OneFootball says the acquisition means clubs, leagues and federations will benefit from increased global audience reach, data insights and a better understanding of their fans’ engagement.
Premium publishers will have access to ‘highly engaging’ exclusive video content, delivered via a plug and play embed solution to complement their editorial. For brands and advertisers, aggregating OneFootball’s fan data with Dugout’s fan profiling platform, FanPro, will deepen audience understanding and increase targeting options.
Meanwhile, fans benefit from an accessible, flexible offering, with instant access to original content including live and archive footage, breaking news, scores, analysis, insights and features.
OneFootball says: “More football will be more accessible to more fans around the world, anywhere, anytime, as a personalised experience.”
CEO and founder of OneFootball, Lucas von Cranach, said: “Since forming OneFootball, our ambition has been to become the ultimate destination for everything football, both on and off the pitch, and our acquisition of Dugout reflects this. This move will benefit the whole football ecosystem with clubs, federations and leagues able to increase audience reach and harness our powerful data insights to gain a deeper understanding of their fans’ engagement. Our brand and advertising partners will have access to new, contextually relevant destinations to reach highly engaged football fans on a global scale, with a local approach.
Elliot Richardson, chairman of Dugout, added: “OneFootball acquiring Dugout brings together two great, complementary businesses with the most talented people in the industry and establishes the world’s largest B2B and B2C football media company. The newly combined business is now in a strong position to accelerate expansion and support our partners through the rapidly changing digital football landscape.