How I turned a Northern Ireland grassroots football idea into a £50m business — with £100m the next target

I’ve always wanted to work in football.

I played the game, studied sport and, after my playing days came to an end, I built several businesses around football and sport between 2005 and 2021.

So, when I look at where TeamFeePay is today, I feel incredibly proud that what started as an idea in Belfast has grown into a business with ambitions across the whole of Europe.

In 2021, I saw a niche in the market for a digital cash and membership solution. The administration challenges faced by clubs had been really exacerbated during Covid. Clubs couldn’t get money from their members in person in the middle of lockdown, so a digital solution looked like the way forward.

Another factor that went in our favour was virtual meetings becoming the norm. We suddenly had the ability to connect with clubs across the UK and meet them face-to-face, albeit over a computer, without having to board a plane, train or car.

We launched TeamFeePay in August 2021 following a seed investment round earlier that year. The business was started by four co-founders who are all still actively involved today.

At the end of year one, we had 100 paying customers and around 90% of them were in Northern Ireland. It’s the inverse now.

We have 2,200 customers, and almost 500,000 players, parents and coaches on the platform. Around 90% of those are outside Northern Ireland.

That change has happened incredibly quickly, and it is something I’m hugely proud of. We are a Belfast business that has taken a solution developed for grassroots football and turned it into a platform being used across the UK, Ireland, Spain and Italy.

TeamFeePay provides a professional platform for grassroots clubs to manage payments and registrations, fundraising and e-commerce. Ultimately, we want to reduce administration and help clubs increase their income so they can concentrate on what really matters — developing players and growing their communities.

We’ve just broken into the Spanish and Italian markets in a very meaningful way and, if things continue on the current trajectory, I believe we could employ another 100 people in addition to the 50 jobs we already plan to create over the next 24 months. Those new roles will be across sales, marketing and product development as we continue our European expansion.

The investment round we secured last December was the catalyst that allowed us to go and spend money in those countries.

The £9 million funding round was led by a £4.5 million investment from YFM Equity Partners and a £3 million investment by the Investment Fund for Northern Ireland equity fund, managed by Clarendon Fund Managers. It also included £800,000 from Techstart and £700,000 from private investors.

That funding has enabled us to become the clear UK category leader and to test the market in Europe.

We are potentially looking at another investment round at the end of the year. That could be anywhere between £5 million and £25 million, depending on how aggressive we want to be in getting after the market opportunity in Europe.

If we get that additional funding, it would allow us to grow to become the EU category leader by some distance and, effectively, be the second biggest in the world. I genuinely believe we can achieve that in the next three years.

I’m fortunate to have people around me who share that belief.

I have a chairman in the business, Michael Black, who continues to push me and give me great inner belief to do what many people may view as impossible.

You need people who believe in you. Clarendon and Techstart have really believed in us and backed us from the start — and that’s because we deliver.

That support is hugely important because ambition is one thing, but turning it into reality requires a strong team, the right expertise and the willingness to keep pushing yourself.

We’re currently sitting at 2,200 clubs and the plan for the next three years is to grow to 10,000 clubs.

We’re adding about 120 clubs every single month right now. Just sustaining that gets us to 10,000 clubs and that will get us to about £50 million in revenue.

Should I get approval from the board, founders and senior team to complete a further funding round, I’d like to think we could grow to 15,000-20,000 clubs and £100 million in revenue in the next five years.

Those are big numbers, but I believe you have to be ambitious if you want to build something that can genuinely compete on the world stage.

Investment brings more than money. Investment brings expertise, it brings oversight and, if you are humble enough and you lean into that, that collective expertise will help you build a world-leading company.

That is something I’ve learned throughout my career. You don’t have to have all the answers yourself. You need to surround yourself with people who can challenge you, support you and bring different expertise to the table.

For me, though, it always comes back to belief.

You’ve got to believe in what you’re building, and you’ve got to go all in. That mindset has taken us from 100 customers in our first year to 2,200 clubs today. It has taken us from being overwhelmingly Northern Ireland-focused to having 90% of our customers outside the region. And it has given us the confidence to look at markets such as Spain and Italy and believe that a Belfast-based company can become a major European player.

I’m incredibly proud that we have been able to create a growing team here, with 104 full-time staff today and more jobs on the way.

For me, that is one of the most rewarding parts of the journey. We are not only building a technology company; we are creating opportunities for people here in Northern Ireland while competing in international markets.

I want TeamFeePay to remain a Belfast success story, even as we become a European business. Our roots are here, and I’m proud of that.

Football has always been about community for me, and I think that is particularly true at grassroots level. Clubs are at the heart of towns, villages and communities across Northern Ireland, and it is incredibly rewarding to know that the technology we have developed is helping those clubs thrive both on and off the pitch.

We have ambitious plans for the future, but I never lose sight of where we started.

I’d like to thank our people, investors, shareholders and customers for supporting us as we’ve developed unique software that is helping empower clubs to thrive on and off the pitch.

We started in Belfast with an idea to solve a problem in grassroots football. Five years later, the European dream is very much alive. And I believe the best is still to come.