BeSoccer was the brainchild of one Manuel Heredia, a lifelong football fan based out of Spain. He happened to be recovering from an injury at the time, and found himself with time on his hands.
You see, Manuel had been frustrated with the state of football data for quite some time. It felt scattered and barely trustworthy, if at all. So in 2006 he set out to build a soccer match results dashboard of his own.
The early solo project focused on results and user contributions, “I wanted to create a collaborative project where people could enter results and comments together," Manuel says.
The original name for the site was Resultados de Fútbol, which eventually evolved into BeSoccer in 2015 to reflect its growing international reach. The new name was coined from a phrase used by the famous martial artist and actor Bruce Lee, who said “Be water.” That really stuck with Manuel, who then adapted it for the purposes of football and ultimately his company, “BeSoccer.”
Once it was up and running, other football fans quickly took to the website. “They kept coming back [to the tool], because the information was fast and it was something they could trust,” Isabel explains.
But Manuel couldn’t rest on his laurels either, for the smartphone era had also arrived at about the same time — and with it, the promise of a computer (read: scoreboard) right in the palm of everyone’s hands, football fans included.
Gone were the days when folks had to rush to their nearest desktop computer to catch the latest scores; now they could get their updates anywhere, anytime.
So Manuel had to move fast… even faster than a goalkeeper trying to block a close-range shot, you might say.
He got to work. First, building and launching BeSoccer’s iOS and Android apps. Then, expanding into other soccer fan bases across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. And before he knew it, BeSoccer wasn’t just reporting on the world’s biggest matches anymore; they were also covering all of the other smaller leagues, whose local competitions still mattered to the fans at the end of the day.
All this growth had a catch though. Servers cost money. Apps need fine tuning. And data, always, must be instantaneous (especially on the busiest of match days).
Meanwhile, the team was already set on another decision: BeSoccer would remain free. And they weren’t going to budge on this.
“So much of our audience comes from places where paying for a subscription just isn’t practical,” Isabel describes. “If we had chosen to lock things away and charge folks for access, we’d have excluded a lot of people.”
And so the team was left with only one real option on the table, something that could help them cover costs, while still keeping access free. And that option was advertising.
Ad revenue could help offset any server costs, pay for the development work, not to mention, the salaries of the now more than 100 people on staff, and who Manuel counted on everyday to run BeSoccer’s ever-expanding operation.
Google Ad Manager ended up being central to this entire setup too. BeSoccer counted on it for displaying ads across its web and app properties, supporting monetization while at the same time, playing nicely with the rest of BeSoccer’s analytics toolkit.
So much so that by the time Isabel joined the company in 2022, BeSoccer’s product, analytics, and monetization teams were firing on all cylinders.
“We’re able to look at everything: traffic, usage, monetization,” she says. “We see what’s working, what’s not, then make informed decisions about how to improve the user experience.”
And the results speak for themselves: a platform on which more than 90% of its users still opt for the free, ad-supported experience instead of paying for the ad-free subscription tier.
They don’t do it out of necessity, mind you; they do it because the platform just works for them.
