In profile: Team FA

Founder and CEO of Team FA Jamie Knowlson discusses the firm’s strategy for social media success and why he believes the company is on the path to become the UK’s biggest sports betting community

“We’re aiming to become theUK’s biggest sports betting  community,” Jamie Knowlson, CEO and co-founder of Footy Accumulators owner Team FA, says with a degree of both optimism and certainty in equal measure. Based on the firm’s growth to-date and market-leading position across social media, it’s not diffcult to see why he’s happy to set the company such an ambitious target.

“We’ve been told we’re in the top three affliates with a lot of the bookmakers we’ve spoken to,” Knowlson says. “It’s always us competing with the usual suspects which is great and we feel with the growth ideas we’ve got coming that we can potentially knock Oddschecker off the top spot, as well as the likes of OLBG, over the next few years.”

While it’s difficult to estimate how much traffic Team FA drives to bookmakers with any degree of certainty, the number of customers referred to its 11 operator partners is clearly in the thousands on a month-by-month basis. The Manchester-based company is today arguably the biggest sports betting community across all social media channels with its flagship Footy Accumulators brand boasting an enviable 258,000 likes on Facebook and 215,000 Twitter followers, while the popularity of its other brands are also growing quickly.

And now the firm is preparing to take one of its biggest leap forwards yet with its sights set firmly on expanding into new markets, with an Australian launch very much on the agenda as part of a joint-venture, in addition to opening a new larger office to aid the next stage of its growth.

Humble beginnings
Team FA was founded in 2012 by three mates – Jamie Knowlson, Lee Struggles and Matt Timms – who had little realisation at the time it would eventually become the three 20-somethings’ full-time jobs. Like many successful online gambling affiliates Team FA began life by accident on one person’s bedroom computer – on this occasion at the University of Sheffield – while on Facebook. “We set up the company as a three originally and had no real dream to grow to the size it is today but we just had a good community with people on these social media sites sharing bets, and we liked having a bet on ridiculous things,” Knowlson recalls.

Unsurprisingly for debt-riddled students, they were shocked when in the early stages of the company’s development a punter put on a £1,000 bet, which they shared with other students who liked the Facebook page. With a sense of community starting to build around the page, Footy Accumulators grew to tens of thousands of people in the space of just a couple of years before the launch of its dot.com site approximately 12 months later.

The company’s modern day set-up sees Knowlson – who joined after acquiring a taste for social media via a job selling Facebook adverts to businesses – lead Team FA’s charge for success as the company’s chief executive officer. His colleague Lee Struggles heads up all the acquisition the company does and is in charge of driving customer numbers through all its social channels while Matt Timms oversees the development of new products and future business growth areas.

Team FA now has more than 20 full time staff and recently invested a significant amount of money in moving to a new office on Fountain Street in Manchester with space for approximately 40 more employees.

“It’s all about expansion, progression and the concept of where we want the business to be,” he says. “I think for the staff coming to work with us there needs to be a good culture and that’s definitely what we thought investment in the office would do and build the foundations for the next few years to grow and expand.”

“The aim is to become the UK’s biggest sports betting community and I believe that’s a target we can really go after and achieve within the next few years,” he adds. With this in mind, Knowlson claims he would be reluctant to partner with some of the smaller bookmakers in the market as he believes its customers would question the firm’s motives of offering odds from non-household names and could, in the long-term, dilute the strength of the brand.

“There’s got to be an element of providing a service to our users and if we start pushing a less reputable operator, our customers are going to be asking why we’re pushing a bookie no one bets with,” he says. “So we have to maintain that standard and show that we’re trying to help the punters out and we don’t want to see that trust disappear, our customers would see straight through it if we started tweaking our casino offers, for example.”

Finding a USP
A lot has changed for the firm in the three years since its inception and the business has gone from one where all three co-founders were initially manning the social pages on a rotational shift to one where it now has its own management board and individual department heads.

Free from the shackles of the social media shift, Knowlson now dedicates his time to making sure it continues to fulfil the targets set out in the business plan it built, as well as looking at expansion overseas and the possibility of white labelling the products it has in its arsenal. In addition, he also maintains relationships with the 11 bookmakers with which it has already signed partnership deals, with the CEO regularly travelling across the UK to meet the industry’s biggest operators face-to-face.

The raison d’etre of Team FA is quite simple with its tagline written on the walls of the office to remind staff of the reason why they’re all there – ‘people talk to us and we talk back’. As a brand Team FA was essentially created by the punters themselves. The birth of the company name originates from a tagline its customers first used on the Footy Accumulators’ social media pages during the beginning of its lifecycle when people would congratulate ‘Team FA’ whenever it won a bet. This interaction with customers and the whole community vibe particularly came to light when in 2013 it helped save one of the country’s oldest football clubs, Kettering Town, from going under when it was unable to pay its debts.

Footy Accumulators took it upon themselves to ask all its followers to help the club out. “We tweeted out saying ‘come on Team FA, let’s pull together, we’ve tipped a few winners in the past, just donate the money’,” Knowlson recollects. “Within two weeks we got the £30,000 for them and they stayed up. We do stuff like that to show that we’re part of a community and to get that community feel.

“We engage with everyone and if someone tweets to us we make sure we tweet them back, suggest bets and show that we can have some banter and a bit of a laugh with them,” he adds. “That’s what we built Team FA on. We’re that guy in the pub that everyone wants to talk to and have a laugh with.”

But has this light-heartedness and banter-mentality ever seen the company go too far like Paddy Power has on occasion? “We’ve done it in the past and picked fights with celebrities which have backfired,” Knowlson admits. “We picked Robbie Fowler once and got into the cocaine/touchline incident which got a bit out of hand. I’m a Liverpool fan as well so I’ve met him before. We have gone a bit too far at times but most of the time it’s a positive response we get on Twitter and Facebook.”

Change in approach
Team FA continues to have the biggest social media following for football, and they worked hard to ensure that remained the case at the end of the season. But it was forced to adapt its strategy when Facebook began tightening up its laws as to what affiliates could and could not promote. The changes meant affiliates without a gambling licence, were no longer able to post direct affiliate links on the platform.

On reflection the potential impact on Footy Accumulators was huge if it hadn’t gone on the front foot and pre-empted what it thought was going to happen. The social network site had long been the company’s bread and butter but Team FA took the decision to switch much of its focus and marketing spend into Twitter which has since grown at a phenomenal rate. The purpose of Facebook, on the other hand, is now more about driving customers to Team FA’s own websites who are then referred to bookmakers from there.

“We decided to build up lots of different assets so that we aren’t just reliant on one thing and when it happened we had a new website, we had Twitter and two or three other strings to our bow including the launch of our new mobile app, AccaTracker,” Knowlson says. “So it wasn’t a big deal compared to other affiliates reliant on Facebook pages, which saw their business basically completely disappear overnight.”

Team FA’s marketing focus has also shifted into other directions in recent months and is no longer as reliant on its social channels as it was initially after kicking off a recruitment drive for web developers and SEO specialists. The Footy Accumulators website, which had approximately 1.3 million unique visits last season, according to Google Analytics, hosts a wide array of content with its editorial team uploading five or six blogs per day on average, from match coverage, previews, suggested bets and funny content. It’s essentially a hub for anyone to come to directly if they want to have a bet or keep up-to-date ahead of Saturday afternoon.

SEO has been an area of particular focus in the last six months and Team FA has grown that side of the business significantly, but Knowlson readily admits its presence isn’t as strong as he’d like. “A lot of people search Footy Accumulators or the Winners Enclosure just because of the brand and they’ve heard of it but we want those who haven’t heard of us and aren’t on social media to come across our site,” he says. “It’s something we’re going to focus on and compete with the big dogs in that area in the next few
years. We appear high on a Google search for ‘accumulators’ but that’s all natural traffic, we haven’t actually done anything to try and get up there.

“It wasn’t a big thing but in the last few months we’ve definitely made it a bigger part of what we do,” Knowlson says. “Financially we became better off with the social, so we monetised that and got some money in the bank to put into a decent site. We wanted a hub where we could put up our own videos instead of sending people to other peoples’ sites, we wanted them to come to ours instead. It just became part of what we do.”

Broadening scope
The increasing popularity of new social media platforms is still offering new opportunities for egaming operators and affiliates alike and with Team FA’s already formidable position across today’s most popular channels, it could be in a position to capitalise. Snapchat, which Paddy Power is currently experimenting with, is clearly one platform which fits in with the company’s mentality and core demographic. However, as the Irish operator has itself admitted to this magazine in the past, Snapchat is still in the experimental stages and for Team FA it comes down to a question of how to monetise it or whether it adds to the whole community vibe.

Instagram, which currently has a ban on in-app links, poses a similar conundrum. “We’ve toyed with Instagram but again you can’t post links on there so it’s more of a community thing again,” Knowlson admits. “We’ve been putting bet slips up there and funny photos from time to time. It doesn’t take up too much of our focus as we still maintain most of our effort on Facebook and Twitter but we could perhaps at some point make Instagram part of our daily routine.”

Until the potential opportunities presented by these new communication formats are realised, Team FA plans to maintain its focus on mobile and the launch of new applications. After working with fellow  Manchester-based company Degree 53 in the past, Team FA now has its own development team in-house. A new multi-sport app is now in the pipeline as part of the company’s strategy to move away from being associated solely with football, a move it hopes will keep the firm’s momentum going between football seasons.

“The great thing about having an app is it’s something you own and you’ve created, unlike Facebook, where it could change the rules tomorrow,” Knowlson says. “I guess Apple can in a way but AccaTracker has a total of 502,000 users last season and in its lifetime over 750,000 of people have used it. We are the biggest independent football gambling app out there in the UK and we want to continue growing with that and get it up into the millions.”

With plans to expand into new markets, production diversification and the launch of new mobile apps, it is unsurprising that Team FA has been approached with acquisition offers by other affiliates and operators. However, unwilling to part with something they’d built from scratch, the three co-founders have turned down attractive offers from four or five different companies. “It’s our dream so let’s continue doing it; hopefully we made the right choice,” Knowlson laughs. Only time will tell but for now it seems to have been a decision which has paid off handsomely.