Partnerships with Purpose: Our collaboration with Stevenage FC

By Andrew Smith, CEO & Founder at SPORTA.

I belong to Hayes Kent Cricket Club.

Say that out loud and it sounds like a small thing. It isn't. I belong to it. My boys belong to it, and in some ways it belongs to me, and them. That is how clubs work in this country. We talk about clubs having a community, and they do. But it runs the other way round too, and that direction matters more.

Clubs have their community.

Communities have their club.

Take one away and something goes with it that no council or government report ever fully measures. The Saturday morning. The place the kids go. The volunteer who has run the bar for nineteen years and knows every family by name.

Today the home of Stevenage FC officially becomes the SPORTA Arena, a partnership that just makes perfect sense...And I want to explain why this has happened. No doubt some in my industry will say its a bought deal. Fine say that. But it isn't. It is a true partnership where mission and vision align.

Why this is personal

Starting and building SPORTA was not a decision I arrived at through market analysis. My entire life has been shaped by sport. Being a fan. Watching it. Playing it. Being coached. Winning occasionally. Losing far more often, then working out what to do with that.

Football, basketball, motocross, motorsport, badminton, tennis. Take those out of my life, not just as a kid but as an adult, and I am simply not me. The discipline, the resilience, how I handle a bad day, how I go at a problem - all of it was built somewhere with a scoreboard or a lap time and someone shouting at me.

It goes further than character, though. Take sport out and I don't have the friends I have. I don't have the community I belong to. Gone. All of it. The people who show up when things go wrong in your life are, for most of us, people we met through something with a ball or an engine in it.

So when I think about that not being there for other people, for kids who are not born yet, I get emotional about it. I am not going to apologise for that or dress it up as strategy. I am fanatical about this mission. Openly.

That is what sits underneath everything we build, and it is what sits underneath today.

The problem nobody is fixing

Here is what I see when we look at sport in this country.

Around 80% of sports clubs fail to break even. That is not the elite end of the game, though find clubs in the EFL that make money! It's all level of sport and all sports - football clubs, cricket clubs, the boxing gyms, the Sunday league sides, the swimming clubs run out of a leisure centre by three volunteers and a WhatsApp group.

Put a number on what sits behind that and you get close to £120bn of social and economic value balanced on foundations that are quietly crumbling. But the number is the non-personal spreadsheet half of the story.

The human half is a kid who loses the one place in the week where they are good at something. It is a teenager who had a routine, a coach, a reason to be somewhere on a Tuesday night, and then didn't. It is a town that loses its heart, the thing that made it feel like a town.

And why is this happening? Not because clubs are badly run. Because the financial infrastructure that underpins every other sector of the economy was never built for sport.

Banking that doesn't understand a club with volunteer signatories. Insurance priced by people who have never stood on a touchline. Payments, ticketing, engagement, media - all of it bought piecemeal, from providers who treat sport as an awkward edge case of retail or worse, something to be exploited.

Sport has been handed other people's tools for decades. It has never been given its own. As a result, it's like trying to ride a bike with one hand and one leg tied behind your back. The result, clubs and teams fail to break even. Individuals are priced out of the sports that they love, opportunities are lost for everyone.

Things don't have to be like this

That is what SPORTA is building. The financial home for sport.

Dedicated infrastructure. Banking and payments, insurance, media, fan engagement, ticketing, built for how clubs actually operate rather than adapted from something designed for an accountant or corner shop. It is why we are going through full regulatory authorisation with the ambition of becoming a dedicated bank for sport, subject to that authorisation completing.

You cannot build that from a spreadsheet in an office in London. You build it next to and with the people living the problem.

Which brings me to Stevenage.

Why Stevenage FC

We have spent months working alongside the senior team at Stevenage FC. They have poured over our full product roadmap, told us what was useful, told us what was noise, even helped us identify new areas of innovation, products and services the club desperately want and need. They have even opened doors that we would not have reached for another year.

They weren't some market research. They were in the room. Collaborating. Working with us, and us with them. And what struck me from the first conversation was how little of it was about football.

Stevenage is not just a football club. Stevenage are deep in their town. They run outreach programmes. They are community first and community driven. And, it's not just the first team and football. If we were looking for a perfect mission aligned partner, then we could not have set out to find a better one in Stevenage.

Phil Wallace, the club's Chairman, put it better than I could when he said this is far more than a naming rights agreement, and that from the first conversations it was clear we shared the club's vision and its desire to make an impact beyond football.

He is right. It is far more.

Ten years, and what that actually means

You could argue that names on a stadium is just marketing. No different to a name on a shirt and more often than not they are. A logo goes up, a cheque clears, three years later a different logo goes up and nobody remembers the last one.

So let me be clear about what this is instead.

This is SPORTA committing to the mission of dedicated infrastructure for sport and working with a flagship football partner to make sure we execute. Its a commitment to not just Stevenage, to the Stevenage fans and community, its a commitment to our sporting mission of making sport available for all and financially sustainable.

To launch all of this in the club's 50th anniversary year is not something we take lightly. Fifty years of a town having its club. It's a new chapter for the town, and a first chapter for us....

The journey changes you...

I have to say life is a journey and SPORTA is very much a journey. Over the past 9 months of it, I have become a Stevenage fan. A proper one, for life.

Not because of the badge. Because of the people. Their sense of purpose. The way they understand exactly how much they matter to the town around them, and how seriously they carry that. The passion. The drive. The vision. The willingness to try things other clubs would talk themselves out of.

I came away from every conversation thinking the same thing. These are our kind of people.

So when we started talking about what SPORTA could do for the club over the long term, we didn't find a customer. We found a partner.

Stevenage FC is now woven into our mission, to make sport available to all, to make it financially sustainable, to make sure it thrives.

And we are woven into theirs.

That is the part I find genuinely exciting.