Gooooallll! The Football App scores $13M to accomodate millions of global fans

Football, or soccer as we know it, has a passionate following around the world ranging from shirtless men with painted faces cheering in UK stadiums to Indian school children kicking a ball down the street.

The Football App has raised $13 million to capitalize on this fervor.  Many football fans are frankly, obsessed, and this product lets them indulge their passion whenever they want.

The app aggregates data, media content, and services like ticketing from various sources and merges them into a ‘one stop shop’ for fans. Claiming to be ‘the world’s leading mobile football community,’ the company has over 3.5 million monthly and up to 1.5 million daily active users who use the app to access live tickers, rankings, team statistics, news etc… about their favorite teams.

The Football App already has a major audience in Europe, and said up to one hundred thousand new users join a day across 155 markets. This financing, led by Earlybird Ventures, will help the company scale to accommodate this growth, especially with the upcoming 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Funds will also be used to add in new social features and release complementary products “around the greatest sport in the world.”

Downloading the app is free on iTunes, Google Play, and Windows store. The content covers over 100 leagues in 6 languages and the company hopes to expand this to 400 leagues and 40 language by the end of the year.

Growth of this speed and magnitude, as well as soaring rates of user engagement, is something every entrepreneur (and their investors) lust over. There are vast resources, companies, and products dedicated to achieving this type of traction. Marketing schemes, advertising campaigns, search engine optimization, social media analytics, referrals, and media attention, it seems, pale in comparison to sheer, simple love of the game.

Photo Credit: Ronnie Macdonald/Flickr