Interest in women’s football has grown exponentially in recent years. The sport now has an estimated 190 million fans in Europe and Lucy Byrne is one of them. In 2023, she was the driving force behind the establishment of a supporter’s club for the Irish women’s soccer team and this month she will launch SportElle, a dedicated app for those who follow women’s soccer.
“Currently, only 5 to 10 per cent of the content published by traditional football platforms is tailored to the women’s football audience,” Byrne says. “However, as providers have begun to recognise the phenomenal growth happening in women’s soccer, there has been a rush to ‘copy and paste’ the templates already in use in men’s sports.”
What this misses, Byrne says, is that there is a fundamental difference between male and female fans.
“Men generally follow teams. Women generally follow individual players. At men’s matches, the typical fare is a pie and a pint. Generally speaking, that’s not what women want.
“SportElle recognises the differences between the sexes and is the first platform built exclusively for the women’s game. Many women have disposable income to spend on the sport they love yet commercial opportunities for them to buy items such as supporter clothing have largely gone untapped to date.”
One of the other reasons Byrne decided to create SportElle was because she was frustrated with the piecemeal way in which information about women’s soccer was made available to supporters.
“Fans have to have three or four different apps on their phones in order to ‘patch together’ results and other information about matches,” she says.
“From speaking to fellow supporters, it became clear that what was needed was a club-agnostic, independent platform with an app that could provide one-click access to results. That’s the basis of SportElle which offers real-time live scores, in-depth analysis and engaging content to fans while also showcasing women’s football across Ireland, the UK and Europe,” adds Byrne who expects the main users of the SportElle app to be in the 16 to 25 age bracket.
Byrne studied commerce at UCD and was working as a tax trainee with Grant Thornton when she realised that rather than being a professional adviser to other people, she really wanted to run her own business. She subsequently went to Trinity College to do a master’s in entrepreneurship and innovation and, as part of her course work, she began developing her idea for the SportElle app.
App data and analysis are provided by a third party in the Netherlands, with features such as live commentary and a web application to come.
Byrne has started with the game that is closest to her heart – she played up to her early 20s – but says the model will work with other sports. She is already looking at women’s college basketball in the US and the GAA. The app is currently free to download: once a critical mass of supporters starts using it, Byrne can begin approaching potential commercial sponsors and advertisers.
SportElle has been launched on a shoestring budget of €20,000 (most of which went on app development) and, as a participant in the Enterprise Ireland New Frontiers programme at the Synergy Centre in TU Tallaght, Byrne received a stipend of €15,000. She is about to start recruiting for a sports data analyst to join her team and a fundraising round of €250,000 is planned for 2025.
“We’ve already onboarded three teams from the US and of course the Spanish market is going to be really important for us. However, for now, our focus is on the Irish and UK markets where women’s football is experiencing phenomenal growth,” Byrne says. “For example, Arsenal has had to move its women’s matches to the big Emirates Stadium as their games were attracting 60,000 supporters. That’s a huge positive development for the sport.”
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