Footballco Opens Middle East HQ in Riyadh

Footballco, has announced the opening of a new regional HQ in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, aimed at serving fans, brands and rights holders across the Middle East and North Africa.

Footballco will retain its previous MENA HQ, located in Dubai, but will now build-out a full-service offering from Riyadh, including local creative and client services teams.

Footballco is majority-owned by Integrated Media Company (IMC), an affiliate of US private equity giant TPG and is the publisher behind several football media brands that serve the region, including GOAL, KOOORA, and an Arabic edition of its women’s football brand, INDIVISA.

Andy Jackson, recently appointed as Footballco’s SVP for the Middle East, is leading the company’s growth in the Middle East. Jackson said: “The Middle East is seeing a surge of interest in its football, both domestically and globally

“By locating our new regional office in Riyadh, we’re positioning Footballco at the centre of this growth, ensuring we can better understand the growing fandom in the region and serve the brands and rights holders helping to drive this growth.”

Footballco already counts several domestic brands and rights holders across the Middle East as clients, and it is working with global brands to help them activate in the region.

While Jackson is relocating to run the company’s Riyadh office, Footballco aims to focus its recruitment on local talent. Recently, this has included the hiring of creative director Amjad Murad, who has joined Footballco from the Jeddah-based agency Social Clinic.

Footballco reaches an audience of 192 million fans across the MENA region, including over half of the adult population of Saudi Arabia each month through GOAL, KOOORA and brands focused on specific audience segments. Jackson said: “While GOAL and KOOORA are our largest brands by scale, we recognise that the fan groups in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, engage with football in different ways to each other.

“For this, we operate a number of brands that resonate with these fan groups. These include the social video brands Yalla GOAL; the recently launched Yalla Girl, which appeal to Gen-Z fans looking for fun and personality in their football content.

“Fans in the Kingdom are younger than other markets we operate in, reflecting the younger skew of the country’s population, and they’re the only group surveyed globally by Footballco where gaming is the most common route into the sport. They’re the most likely to get their football news from social media. Young fans in the Kingdom are also significantly more interested in players over clubs - which is why we believe our editorial ethos of bringing fans closer to the players they love makes them choose our brands over others.”

Footballco also serves fans of women’s football in the Kingdom, reaching four million Saudi women each month. Jackson says, “As well as covering the growing women’s game in the region through GOAL and KOOORA, we operate two social-first brands geared towards how young women want to consume football content. These include Yalla GIRL, which takes the same personality-driven and fun-first approach to football content to football as YALLA GOAL, and INDIVISA.

INDIVISA’s approach is to support the rise of women’s football through the championing of grassroots football and providing a home to the growing women’s football community.”

Footballco’s Riyadh office will be supported by its global teams with the aim of raising the local headcount to 20 by the end of 2025.