We interviewed Mounir Zok, CEO of N3XT Sports. Read on to know how we, as a company, are adapting to the current situation, how we are helping our clients to keep moving forward in this new context, and the new opportunities that sports organizations have to stay relevant.
1. N3XT Sports is a sports consulting firm specialized in digital and data, innovation, technology, and investment strategy. What do you do with the clients you work with?
N3XT Sports is a strategic consulting firm founded in Silicon Valley and headquartered in Barcelona, to better serve the European and Middle Eastern markets. We set up the company because of a tectonic shift happening in the sports industry, driven by powerful macro trends such as changing consumer habits, technological advances, and fragmentation of revenue.
Our ecosystem-approach positions us right in the middle of endemic stakeholders such as rights holders, commercial partners and athletes, and non-endemic stakeholders such as investment funds, tech companies, and startups, that are entering the market. Largely, the sports industry has not managed to interact with and leverage these new trends, which is where we come in.
Our clients depend on us to guide them through the development of innovation, investment, data and digital strategies and also supporting the implementation. For example, how can an international federation’s commercial & marketing team be prepared to negotiate its data rights with a new technology partner that wants to provide cloud services. We’re here to equip stakeholders in the sports industry with tools and skills to make the most out of this shift.
2. As CEO of N3XT Sports, how is your organization adapting to the COVID-19 situation?
When we were observing what was happening in China and in Italy, we knew that Spain was next and started putting into motion lots of processes and lots of habits of working remotely. For us it has not been such a big challenge compared to other companies because we were already used to working remotely. Our team is spread in different countries in Europe such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland as well as in the United States. We had a couple of days of tuning and setting up different tools and processes and just getting everyone on the team on board and helping them feel comfortable. That is on the back-end.
On the front-end, we have increased our communications & marketing efforts, for example, through the weekly webinars. Our clients and partners are continuing to place their trust in us during this time, to help them think through and implement game-changing strategies across investment, digital & data strategies. Additionally, we are connecting with a wide group of prospects from across the sports industry who are prioritizing strategic initiatives, and thinking about their future business models and the post-COVID-19 landscape. As a company, since the end of 2019, we have strengthened our digital & data capabilities even further, so we now offer assessment and evaluation services as well as strategy development and implementation in these two areas.
3. Has N3XT Sports changed its strategy in order to adapt to the needs of the industry?
What we have found ourselves doing in the past four weeks is changing the type of conversations we’ve been having. In the past, we would be talking equally about innovation, digital and investment strategies. We do understand that while all are important, the urgency today is on figuring out the digital, data, and technology piece. So for the next months, we will be more focused on the digital, data & tech side rather than the innovation side. From a stakeholder perspective, we will continue to prioritize the football and Olympic industries. Moving forward, we foresee a changing commercial model around sports, which will mean that investors will play a key role in the replenishment of capital and strengthening of balance sheets. We’re having some conversations on this already, but we expect this to accelerate in the 2nd half of the year when operating budgets and future income forecasts start to squeeze even further.
4. In the absence of live events, what can sports organizations do to stay relevant, to keep engaging with their fans and brands?
I believe it’s a great moment for sports organizations to realize that we are in the entertainment industry. My strongest recommendation would be to think like a tech company, that takes advantage of data-driven insights to deliver hyper-personalized experiences and content to fans and partners. This means that it is the right time to prioritize digital transformation within the organization. More specifically, it means delivering on digital while also transforming into a digital organization. You can clearly see the organizations within the sports industry and beyond that have already invested in their digital foundation. They are able to produce new content, personalize it, and deliver value to commercial partners, and generate new revenue streams.
5. Do you think that this global crisis is going to change the mindset of many sports organizations? Why? And how so?
I think there are two specific insights that we are uncovering, thanks to the fact that we are at home and the events around the world are paralyzed today.
The first one is that we have to invest in our digital assets, we have to invest in our digital processes, and we have to improve our internal processes. Now partners and sponsors are asking for more than just having the brand on the jersey or in the venue, they are asking for digital activation activities and to get closer to the fan. So this is prime time to take that into consideration and develop what is needed to be able to achieve that.
The other big insight is the diversification of business. It’s extremely important to realize that the sports industry cannot rely, anymore, on one specific event happening for our industry to work.
For many years, there were no revenue streams that have been generated outside of the sports events portfolio, but this has changed in the past years. Having an investment strategy in place and having an innovation strategy in place enables you to think about what new businesses can be launched, what new value can be generated and how to work with new stakeholders.
What we’re going to see moving forward is more attention on digital, which will mean more budget allocated to digital initiatives. We will also see organizations start setting up innovation, investments, and new business activities to address the question of what do we do beyond just sports?
If you would like to learn more about our team, you can read the interviews with Hisham Shehabi, our Chief Operations Officer, and Jordi Ferré, one of our co-founders.