OneFootball’s Eddie Rivoldi on why content, not competition, is new currency of football

The launch of its new international campaign, ‘This Is Our Club,’ marks a strategic repositioning. As younger audiences prize digital access over traditional viewing, OneFootball is evolving from a live score and news aggregator into a dynamic ecosystem of streaming, editorial, gamification and fandom. And at the center of it all is content, which is being created fast, shared faster and designed to own the moment.

“We did a poll among fans and saw three things. Short form content is king, anything between 15 and 30 seconds is it and, after that, we lose them,” says Eddie Rivoldi, brand marketing lead at OneFootball and the creative lead behind the campaign he hopes will take OneFootball to global football/soccer fans.

The moment economy

What Rivoldi is describing isn’t just a marketing trend; it’s a full-scale shift in how modern fans are consuming and interacting with sport. Where legacy broadcasters once controlled access to matches and highlights, platforms like OneFootball are now shaping fandom by owning everything in between – the speculation before the match, the post-match memes and the countless micro-moments that fuel fan conversations.

From his perspective, the modern football fan is “mobile first,” hungry for real-time content that goes beyond results.

“Our fans are consuming content at all hours of the day, before a match is peak time and after a match we get them as well. We have live blogs where they are constantly checking in, seeing what the lineups will be, getting every last minute of information before kick-off.”

The app’s most visited pages aren’t always match reports – they’re the match-day feeds, squad updates and editorial content that contextualize a game’s significance. OneFootball’s user base (some 35 million registered users, with 85% opting in to push notifications) doesn’t wait for Sky Sports to set the agenda. They get it pushed directly to their phones, tailored to their preferences.

Content as infrastructure

OneFootball’s approach is to position itself not merely as a content publisher but as a content infrastructure. It operates a global player network that embeds its video engine into the websites of over 200 publishers delivering official content from clubs and federations worldwide.

“If I could just summarize it in one line, we’re giving the world’s clubs a platform. We’re giving them an official profile to push out their content to reach all places of the world that potentially their own channels couldn’t reach.”

This distribution model isn’t just a value-add for clubs. It transforms OneFootball into a syndication engine for real-time content, enabling football institutions to reach fragmented, digitally native audiences without building bespoke tech solutions of their own.

The ‘This Is Our Club’ campaign, devised internally by Rivoldi and his team, builds on this infrastructure, visualizing the community of “football-heads” – a digital-native tribe of fans who live inside group chats and fan memes, not just on the terraces.

“The spot itself was very product-feature focused, but what we really were trying to do was showcase the different rituals and fandom behavior of the football fans that we see. These are the football-heads. These are the ones that are the avatars.”

The personalization play

Central to the campaign is the introduction of OneFootball Heads, customizable avatars that evolve as users engage with the platform. More than a creative flourish, they represent a new push into sports gamification and personalization, rewarding behavior while collecting more nuanced data on how fans interact with content. An absolute boon for commercial partners looking to target valuable sports communities.

In an era where attention is the most contested commodity, OneFootball’s bet is that identity, rooted in ritual, club loyalty and digital expression, can be used to strengthen user retention and deepen emotional engagement.

Physical footprint, digital intent

Despite its mobile-first foundation, the campaign is also designed to show up IRL. On matchdays in London, for instance, fans will encounter a fully synced digital out-of-home campaign, delivering real-time matchday content along the full fan journey, from train station forecourts to stadium entrances.

“We should be appearing right when the lineup is ready: ‘Check out the match page.’ Until we get to the actual stadium. We’re building a media plan right now, all the local touchpoints, from the train station to the bus station to walking up the street.”

This ‘phygital’ approach, meeting fans both in the streets and in their screens, echoes a trend seen across all sports entertainment: the integration of real-world fandom with digital storytelling. For OneFootball, it’s an attempt to become the connective tissue across every touchpoint of the matchday experience.

Branded content

While the campaign is largely about building community and awareness, particularly in the UK and the US, it also unlocks new commercial pathways. Rivoldi highlights recent partnerships with Heineken and Toni Kroos as examples of how storytelling and branded content can merge in a fan-first format. “We’re doing these branded content partnerships with big brands. And it’s always centered around giving, whether it’s a reward or access, but it’s a genuine kind of fan experience.”

These aren’t traditional sponsorships. They’re co-created narratives designed for the attention economy, so snackable, story-driven and distributed via OneFootball’s growing digital ecosystem. The platform is already eyeing branded storytelling opportunities around the next World Cup.

The future is always on

At its core, ‘This Is Our Club’ is less a campaign and more a proof of concept, a signal that OneFootball isn’t just building an app, but a media entity born for the moment economy. And with Rivoldi, a Peruvian-born, US-raised marketer who cut his teeth in LA entertainment and Bundesliga branding, at the creative helm, it’s a team that understands both sport and story.

Rivoldi’s strategy is clear: fans no longer want just fixtures; they want feelings. They want to feel part of a tribe, understand the locker room dynamics and know the next meme before it lands. The most valuable thing in modern sport isn’t goals but moments and whoever owns those moments wins.

As Rivoldi puts it: “The clubs and the federations, they are the content. They are the fuel and the stories never sleep.” And in the world OneFootball is building, neither does the feed.