MUNICH — While U.S. sports have embraced the hackathon, with the NBA hosting its own hack, European sports and their teams by contrast have been much slower to jump into this space.
While English soccer team Manchester City held a hackathon for the past two years, compared to the NBA’s and others in the U.S., these events have tended to be smaller in size.
FC Bayern Munich, one of the most storied clubs in European soccer, decided to hold its own inaugural hackathon this past weekend and took inspiration from U.S. sports organizations in doing so.
FC Bayern HackDays invited 220 participants from over 40 countries to take part in a hackathon, which was held at the club’s iconic Allianz Arena.
In an interview at the event, Benjamin Stoll, Project Manager for Digital Club Platforms at Bayern Munich, outlined how much American sports teams and technology companies impacted the German club’s thinking.
“We’ve been thinking about holding this event for two years,” he said. “Stefan Mennerich, our Director Media, Digital and Communication, and I, held an exploration trip to the U.S. and talked to many organizations like the Golden State Warriors, the NBA, the San Francisco 49ers, Facebook and Twitter.
“We did this in order to learn and also to actually exchange thoughts on how we can leverage technology for new solutions and new fan experiences that benefit fans. When we were looking at the U.S market, we saw that there were hackathons with the NBA and the NFL, so we were quite curious about that and tried to find out more about these events.”
According to Stoll, the overall goal from the hackathon was clear for the soccer club.
“We decided to hold the HackDays event because we wanted to create a new platform to involve passionate and smart people from all over the world,” he said. “It is always very valuable to ask and involve fans and hear their opinions and then use their passion to create something completely new.”
While the lessons from U.S. events were crucial, he also felt that passion for soccer — and FC Bayern Munich in particular — was crucial to the event.
“We’re an emotional brand, which makes us distinctive from industry brands doing hackathons,” he said. “They need prize money to attract clever people, we’re using the emotional power of FC Bayern to attract people.”
Within seven predetermined challenges, up to 70 teams competed to win their specific challenge in order to get through to the grand final and have a chance to win the overall event. The majority of teams were also randomly put together.
Yet, some startups did participate in the hackathon, one of which was Deeply, which detects demographic data through face recognition technology, including age, gender and emotions. The product does not currently have any application to sports, however. Instead, the company looked to use the event as a test case.
“This is why we’re here to try to create a prototype to raise fan engagement through emotions and maybe get FC Bayern as a pilot customer,” Deeply co-founder Julian Spörl said:
When moving from conception to actual execution of the event, according to Stoll, holding a hackathon in the country is not without its challenges.
“To hack in Germany means something negative, like something to break into,” he said. “Yet in the U.S. it has positive connotations, like to solve a problem or create a new solution. That is something that we are very interested in. How can we use tech to reach not only our fans, but even new ones, and also do it in a way that hasn’t been done before?”
In order to make the event successful as possible, Bayern enlisted the help of some of its current commercial partners, which financed the event, and also importantly, UnternehmerTUM, a non-profit organization that seeks to help entrepreneurship blossom in Germany. It also has a lot of experience and also credibility in holding large-scale hackathons.
“We are a football club, our core competence is not hackathons, so we also needed a partner to learn from,” Stoll said.
“We try to do special hackathons and we do one called TechFest, which is one of the largest hardware hackathons in Europe,” explained Dr. Andreas Liebl, a partner at UnternehmerTUM.
Liebl is responsible in his role for organizing hackathons, and he felt a hack focusing on sport would be quite unique.
“Sport is an area where the relationship of fans and clubs is very, very intense. Much more intense than companies and their customers, but the interaction between the two, in terms of co-innovating is very limited so far.”
He also felt that the potential of sports hackathons has not yet been realized in Europe.
“If you look at some of the hackathons within sports, such as in the U.K., the overall outcome from these, to date was limited,” Liebl said.
Six of the predetermined challenges addressed issues that were of interest to Bayern Munich’s key sponsors. For example, for the Adidas challenge, teams were briefed to focus on how they could increase in-app conversion rates for the official suppliers of FC Bayern’s team apparel. For the Audi Challenge, the focus was on how driving to and from the Allianz Arena could become integrated into the fan experience.
One participant in this challenge was Mohammed Hussain.
“The issues are with fans getting to the games. Some take their cars and it is usually not a wholly positive part of going to a game. Carpooling with other FC Bayern fans was one idea for example,” Hussain said.
Stoll believed that “the most important thing is that they aren’t just our partners, they are champions of their respective industries in Germany as well.”
However, a key point for both Bayern Munich and UnternehmerTUM was that participants could actually test their prototypes out at a live soccer match.
“We decided to build it around a football match because it has to be authentic and inspiring,” Stoll said.
The current German champions beat lowly Werder Bremen 4-2 this past weekend. Before, during and after the match, hackathon teams engaged with fans to get real-world feedback, ahead of their final pitches the next day.
“What we find with hackathons is the more interaction you have with customers, the better the final outcome,” Liebl said.
“Our wish was that there is some kind of feedback loop and that ideas aren’t created in a bubble. This is a typical practice of sponsors within the sports setting and that’s what we wanted to encourage hackathon participants to also do.”
The eventual winners of the entire hackathon, a team called “Beat Adidas” found that this real-world testing was crucial to it actually improving and ultimately creating the winning idea. The team created a gamified in-app experience whereby users had to complete a specific challenge in order to be rewarded.
Team leader, Christoph Hamsen, a quantum physicist, said: “When we shared the app with people, they used their phone in a very different way. We designed it in a way that it uses acceleration sensors so you only have to hold it in your hand. You don’t have to look at it and people get feedback on if their jump squat was successful via vibration in the app.”
Despite the event now being over, the journey doesn’t end there for the winners. First, they get to enjoy an all-access trip to an upcoming Champions League game with Bayern Munich. However, UnternehmerTUM also wants to help teams like Beat Adidas after the hackathon.
“Also, FC Bayern are the same, they want to continue with the ideas that come from this event,” Liebl said.
Meanwhile for FC Bayern, the process of innovating continues unabated after the event.
“About two years ago we finished our project called ‘Digital 4.0,’ where we digitalized our entire infrastructure,” Stoll said.
“The most important thing about digitalization, for us, is the people involved. We need to change mindsets, we need to be very open to learning. We don’t just need to digitalize our infrastructure, but our entire club.
“I’m often asked, ‘When will your app be finished?’ Or our website. Our new answer is to always say ‘never.’ It will never be ready, there’s always room for improvement.
“Our goal is to be a benchmark in the digitalization of a soccer club.”
