This month, a live fantasy sports experience will release in the from of a new application, Ballr Football. Ballr, a Singapore-headquartered technology company, brings fans in Asia together to connect, compete and communicate in real-time during sporting events.
The platform will first launch a soccer-specific app with a direct focus on the English Premier League.
Ballr Football is free and provides fans with a chance to win shoes, phones, watches, cars and experiences (even a trip to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United).
“With more than 3 billion viewers worldwide, the English Premier League is unparalleled in terms of global audience,” Ballr CEO Sam Jones said in a statement. “We chose to launch Ballr Football to cover this league.”
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Before the scheduled launch of Ballr Football in October, Ballr has been nabbing partnerships.
On Sept. 22, Ballr partnered with Manchester City in hopes it can attract fans across the world featuring exclusive Blues’ merchandise.
Ballr will represent Manchester City in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.
According to Manchester’s Senior Vice-President of Partnerships, Damian Willoughby, the Blues’ organization wants to interact more with their fans and extending to a digital sphere like Ballr could do just that.
“We are delighted to be announcing a partnership with one of the most exciting teams in the world, Manchester City,” Jones said in a statement. “Their fan base in Asia is growing rapidly and this is an opportunity for their fans to have an even greater connection with the club.”
The digital industry is incredibly appealing to the sports industry. According to Ballr, 93 percent of the individuals that watch live-sport also carry mobile phones.
Ballr’s app will help connect those individuals to the thousands of micromoments that occur during a sporting event, and create a competitive setting where users can come together.
Although its Asia-focused launch appears to only be a short stop in its overall journey, Ballr hopes it can create a unique experience for those 400 million adult sport fans overseas.
“We took a long look at the daily fantasy sport arena that has been so popular in USA in recent years. We felt that the game style needed simplifying for the Asian marketplace,” Jones said. “That means designing games that last minutes not hours. As such our interface is more like Tinder than it is FanDuel or Tab. You could call what we do micro fantasy sports.”