Athleo: when sports meet business
Did you know that European Sports Week is celebrated every year from September 23rd to 30th? This European Commission initiative was set up to promote a healthier, active lifestyle through sports and physical activity. The objective is to encourage people, regardless of age, background, or circumstance, to engage in physical activity and to make sports accessible for everyone. In honor of this week, discover Athleo’s history and the connection between sports and business.
A 360° service by and for athletes
Athleo is an app for professional soccer and basketball players, founded by the French professional basketball player Gary Florimont.
Athleo’s story begins with a simple statement: professional athletes must manage their careers and their image – just as companies do. Athletes must work with many different types of professionals to set up and maintain a successful career. They rely on the guidance and expertise of their agents, doctors, physiotherapists, etc. However, finding trustworthy and capable personnel can be a challenge.
Athleo’s goal is to allow professional athletes to connect with each other without intermediaries and to help them professionalize and enhance their image on social networks through personal branding (reputation management and personal data management).
The app offers a data safe service, providing athletes with the ability to securely store important documents, manage their profiles by highlighting key elements of their career (like an online CV), store data related to the games they’ve played (history, score, etc.), and to list relevant media links.
The app provides athletes with easy access to their peers. It enables them to build relationships, launch discussions (sports-related or otherwise), and discover new professional opportunities.
Athleo also connects athletes with trustworthy professionals in their field. The app facilitates access and processes; ensuring athletes can easily get in touch with peers and the best personnel. The latter is graded through the app’s review system.
Athleo: from the playing field to the stage
Gary Florimont took the app one step further by making it an integral component of his sports agency’s modus operandi. His sports agency, Athleo Sport, harnesses this technology as well as an Athlete Insights program to boost the careers of professional athletes.
Athlete Insights aims to support athletes in their career transition, highlighting retired athlete’s soft skills to employers among other things. The sports agency organizes public speaking opportunities for athletes, finds them appropriate coaching roles.
Two brands in the Mantu network, Seven Circles and Pixel Alliance, were integral to the development of the Athleo app. They collaborated on the app’s design and development, business model, and app store rollout. While Seven Circles developed the mobile app and worked on the Application Programming Interface, Pixel Alliance designed its UX/UI. This fruitful collaboration produced a highly personalized service, tailored to its users, a cross between personal branding, networking, and coaching. Human interaction remains a key component of the app’s design and development, after all, tomorrow is human.