Sportme Heads For The UK

Sportsmen and women in the UK are about to witness the biggest shake-up in how they organise their sporting lives with the launch of www.sportme.org, this country’s most complete online Sports Community.

You gotta love press releases. This snippet accompanies the launch of the UK version of Frankfurt based sportme, an online community for professional and hobbyist athletes and sport clubs.

I don’t have an overview on sports communities in the UK, but the competition can’t be fiercer than in Germany where we have seen literally dozens of communities and social networks about sports popping up in the last few weeks (Champions World, deinfussball, Die Fans, get2sport, meinSport, netzathleten, Soccerspin, Spielerkabine, Sportiversum, torfreunde, yocapi, yourteam to name a few.) They all vary in focus and features, but most let athletes, teams or clubs create profiles, connect with other athletes, teams or clubs, find buddies for activities and keep members in the loop about news and sport events.

None of the sites has been gaining too much traction so far. Deutsche Startups compared a few sports communities a few weeks ago and the average traffic rank at Alexa is at about 500,000 (i.e. a few hundred visitors a day at best.) There definitely is a huge market, but building an initial community and mindshare in this segment involves a lot of footwork, domain knowledge and probably good connections.

Operations for the UK version are lead by Dani Warshager. It will be interesting to keep an eye on how this evolves.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)