Ricardo Peixoto: “The best sports apps don’t compete with the live game for attention. They act as a companion that makes the live game way more interesting.”

Raw data just tells you what happened. Engagement is about explaining why it happened, and giving fans something to argue about with their friends.

Take our Player Ratings as an example. We crunch thousands of complex data points into a single, straightforward score. You don’t need a degree in statistics to look at it and immediately understand who actually controlled the game. But at the same time, if you want to dig deeper into the granular stats behind that score, the door is wide open.

Sports are inherently emotional. Fans aren’t just looking for clinical facts; they want validation for their opinions, context for what they’re seeing, and frankly, ammunition for the inevitable group chat debates.

That’s why the second-screen experience has exploded. When people watch a match on TV, they use us simultaneously to track real-time momentum and decisive moments that the broadcast commentators might miss or can’t display visually. The best sports apps don’t compete with the live game for attention. They act as a companion that makes the live game way more interesting.

Our average user opens the app six times a day and clocks about 90 minutes a month. You don’t get that kind of stickiness if you only care about the 90 minutes on the pitch.

We look at the fan experience as a full cycle. Hours before kick-off, people are checking lineups and head-to-head stats. Then the game starts, and they’re glued to live tracking and player ratings. But it doesn’t end there. They come back hours later, or even the next morning, to see the fallout of the result.

The secret to keeping them long-term is building a daily habit, and personalization is a huge part of that. But you have to be careful. App notifications are a double-edged sword. If you bombard users with spammy alerts, they’ll just turn them off. We only ping them when it actually matters to their specific team or player. You have to earn that screen space.

Big tournaments will always drive massive download spikes. But real retention is winning the quiet moments. If a fan opens your app on a random, rainy Tuesday night just to check a minor league score because they trust you to have it fast, that’s when you know you’ve won them over.

In Brazil, football is never consumed in silence. It’s deeply tied to identity, fierce local rivalries, and constant conversation. Fans there don’t just want a final score, they want to dissect the performance, defend their favorite players, blast the referee, and hash it out with anyone who will listen.

Because of that, individual player data is gold. Our Player Rating gives fans a hard, objective baseline for arguments that would usually be completely subjective. Features like our “Player of the Season” or “Goal of the Round” do so well because they turn season-long metrics into interactive fan moments. It gives the audience an active voice instead of just pushing content at them.

Brazilians are also incredibly tuned into social media, local creators, and club channels for discovery. You can’t just take a global marketing strategy, run it through Google Translate, and expect it to work there. True localization means understanding the regional calendar, the specific tone of the local fan bases, and the exact cultural jokes and references that are trending right now.

Major tournaments are incredible for driving downloads, but a massive spike in installs can give you a false sense of security. The real test of a World Cup strategy starts the day after the final.

First, you have to look at why a user downloaded the app in the first place. Did they join for a fantasy league? Were they just tracking their national team, or following one specific superstar? Once you know that hook, you have to immediately guide them toward everyday habits before the tournament ends. If they followed Neymar, you need to seamlessly transition them into tracking his club matches, domestic leagues, or setting up alerts for similar players.

This transition can’t be an afterthought. You have to map out the post-tournament product journey and content strategy months before the opening ceremony even begins.

Looking ahead, the Women’s World Cup represents a massive opportunity. We can’t treat it as a one-month marketing blitz. It needs to be a launchpad for building a permanent audience for the women’s game, which means scaling up our coverage, securing local partnerships, and building narrative arcs around the players well ahead of time.

The biggest mistake companies make is treating data coverage, product design, and monetization as totally separate goals. The real value happens when a partnership ties all of these pieces together.

Slapping two logos next to each other on a banner doesn’t cut it anymore. You actually have to build something functional together.

Look at what we did with Torneo. Grassroots, youth, and amateur leagues have incredibly passionate communities, but they usually lack data infrastructure or online visibility. By stepping in to help organizers digitize their matches, we brought amateur results and player stats onto a global platform. The organizers got a professional setup, the athletes got real recognition, and their families got a great way to follow along.

When you turn data into engaging content, it naturally drives up user participation. That visibility creates immediate, tangible value for commercial sponsors. The best partnerships don’t start with a sales pitch for a media package; they start when two companies sit down to solve a specific, shared problem.

AI is going to make sports data feel much more conversational and highly contextual. Right now, apps are great at showing you what happened. The next shift is explaining why a specific stat actually matters to you.

Think about it: two people can watch the exact same match for completely different reasons. One person only cares if their home team wins. Another is tracking a specific player for their fantasy lineup. A third might be looking at live betting odds.

AI will allow sports platforms to completely tailor the interface and live updates in real time based on those distinct motivations. Instead of everyone seeing the exact same generic dashboard, your app will highlight the specific stories, momentum shifts, and analytical breakdowns that match your personal biases and interests as a fan.