II-2. Issues

What problems are ProjectWITH trying to resolve?

The key problem Project WITH is trying to solve is that the sports industry is too polarized all around the world. In particular, the global football market has not been able to smoothly reallocate and accurately evaluate the value of numerous football players worldwide due to the absence of reliable information and platform compared to the market size and the ripple effect.

According to FIFA, there are 300 million people who enjoy football, which is the most participated sport in the world, of which 38 million players and 2,800 clubs are officially registered in FIFA. If extended to other sports besides football, the figure grows more than double and millions of new athletes will be enrolled at professional or college levels each year.

However, the reality is that less than 0.1% of the athletes are known to receive wages to earn a living, and most athletes in the league do not get enough opportunities in one club and leave the field and choose a completely unrelated job to sports except for the top-level leagues. Based on the years of experience of WITH team, which has been in charge of agency and front-line duties in the football industry, there were countless players retiring because they do not recognize the fact that they can extend their careers in other countries/leagues if enough information is being exchanged.

One of the main reasons of the incident is the lack of agents and information sharing channels. Anyone who is not interested in sports would have seen hundreds, billions of contracts signed with star agents who manage contracts for world-class athletes such as George Mendes (Football), Scott Boras (Baseball), and Bob Arum (Boxing) through media at least once. However, such cases are limited to only top 0.01% star players, and in numerous second-tier teams, the majority of players got no agents, therefore leaving the ground alone without knowing which club wants them.

The WITH team believes that there are problems in transfer/scout market in every point of view from Athlete/ Club/ Agent (Intermediary) to the fans watching them, so even worldwide professional clubs scout athletes through big sports events such as FIFA World Cup, as they still do not possess all the information of athletes from other countries and sports leagues, but has enormous possibilities of improvements.

Moreover, other than poor networks, the problem is the lack of metric to assess the value of an athlete.

The priority of the athlete transfer will be the “value of the relevant athlete” by far. The “value” in the context is used variously in sports events, and the best-known example for the public would be the various evaluation methods of baseball represented by “Moneyball”. In case of baseball, at the level where only one-dimensional records of individual players such as batting average, on-base percentage, and ERA were used as statistics, many teams actually benefit from the WAR (Wins Above Replacement), which mean “multiplier for a replacement player contribution”, using various offense/defense indicators such as BABIP, UZR and etc.

In case of football which project WITH will apply first, the profit-related metric that is most important in the top-level leagues is to be represented by 1) future transfer fee values, 2) uniforms, and other merchandise sales. This is because in the case of upper leagues, most of them are star coaches who takes the center, and the team is also operated based on the coaches’ tactic and philosophy, and the coaches themselves are responsible for the results.

On the other hand, in the lower leagues where the coach’s impact is relatively low and the sales of uniform and merchandise are not high, the priorities are 1) Contribution of points required to advance to the top league, 2) Future value of transfer fee. Unlike baseball and American football where the use of statistics is generalized, in case of football, only a few clubs are considering it, and there are no statistics on the level of Moneyball in baseball so far, and as explained above, this is because top-tier leagues with largest capital, top-level teams tend to rely on star coaches and outstanding star players rather than on statistics.

Although the amount of information provided by football statistics service providers such as Wyscout, Transfermarkt, and Opta is increasing recently, the services that analyze data and link analysis result to decision making are limited. As football statistics are yet to be released at the moment, some say that the club that develops the first applicable metric will become a strong team in a long term. However, based on the precedents of other sports, it is deemed difficult to develop and apply the metric in the lower leagues as many of the best statisticians with the best spec are required by clubs, instead of the experts of the respective sports.

In summary, in the perspective of the Athlete/ Club/ Agent/ Fan, the problem of the transfer/scout market is as follows:

1. Athlete: In the ecosystem of football, besides the world-famous athletes, there are also many unknown players. They do not get enough opportunities due to the lack of network (agent/ club) to find the appropriate team. In addition, even if they are connected to the agent or club, they are not receiving a reasonable valuation due to the lack of objective valuation indicators.

2. Club: Likewise, it is not easy to discover athletes with high potential in the global market only with a few scouters. In addition, when discovering unknown athletes, there is uncertainty about their physical condition and there is difficulty in calculating the transfer fee only basing on the potential.

3. Agent: Besides famous athletes, it is difficult to discover high potential athletes. Even if they are discovered, the transfer fee/weekly wage negotiation with clubs is difficult because there is no accurate valuation metric.

4. Fan: The fundamental need of influencing the transfer of the athletes they support exists.

Limitations of Contents and Channel

As time passes, the fans’ demand for sports-related content is rapidly increasing in the aspects of quality and quantity. In the past, limited channels (EPSN, Naver, etc.) were used for domestic and foreign professional sportsrelated videos, but now a variety of amateur video and self-created video of YouTubers from Youtube and community café channels are rapidly spreading/consumed.

In addition to limitations of contents, the demand for professional articles about sports is also growing rapidly. In the U.S., the main consumption channel is written by professional columnists on ESPN and other professional channels, and texts shared by fans on YouTube/Twitter, and in South Korea, the channels are divided into separate bulletin boards such as Daum/Naver café for football, DC inside gallery for basketball, and MLBPARK for baseball, and the texts written by professional columnists are also divided into large platforms (Naver, Daum, etc.). That is, the quantity/quality of the channels and content that the fans can enjoy on single channel are limited.