OneFootball | Transformation & Go To Market
Launching a direct-to-consumer business across five global markets
I led research for OneFootball’s first D2C product, from pricing strategy and usability to live support operations. The insights shaped the product roadmap, supported revenue model decisions, and helped scale a premium offering for football fans worldwide.
The challenge
For most of its early growth, OneFootball was known as a mobile-first platform for football scores, news, and match updates. In 2019, the company made a bold strategic move: it sought to enter the live sports broadcasting space by offering pay-per-view (PPV) matches directly in its app. The ambition was to stream competitions such as 2nd Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal, La Liga, and others across multiple international markets. This shift meant building not just a new set of features, but an entirely new business unit: one that combined product development, pricing strategy, live support infrastructure, and broadcaster partnerships under a unified experience. It was OneFootball’s first major step into OTT streaming, and the first time it owned the full customer journey for a paid product.
My role
As Head of User Research, I was responsible for shaping both the strategic foundation and the user-facing experience of this new business line. My work touched multiple areas: from product usability and monetization research to brand perception and building a 24/7 customer support setup. My role was to ensure that all decisions were grounded in evidence, and that the streaming offering would not only function, but resonate with our users and scale operationally.
My approach
We began with foundational research to understand how football fans in Germany and Brazil consumed live matches. The central question was whether users would engage with full-length, 90-minute games on a mobile device, and under what conditions. These insights informed our early product strategy and helped the team focus on features that mattered most to fans, such as screencasting and Picture-in-Picture viewing.
To shape monetization strategy, I led a multi-market pricing study. With responses from over 42,000 users in eight countries, we uncovered clear willingness-to-pay thresholds and elasticity patterns. These findings directly influenced pricing decisions and were used by the executive team in broadcaster revenue-share negotiations.
In parallel, we launched brand research to evaluate how users perceived OneFootball in comparison to traditional broadcasters like Sky and DAZN. This helped inform our positioning in partnership discussions and guided the messaging for product marketing.
Finally, I built and scaled a customer support operation for the live product: available in five languages and optimized for weekend and evening coverage. I hired dedicated leads, introduced shift-based staffing, and worked with internal teams to build essential tooling. This ensured that the experience could be supported reliably, even under peak load during live matches.
The impact
This work laid the foundation for OneFootball to become the first platform in Germany to offer in- app PPV streaming for live football. We expanded into several international markets and established OneFootball as a credible, user-centric distributor of premium live content. The research insights I delivered shaped both our product roadmap and revenue strategy, while the operational systems I helped design made it possible to scale the experience globally. More than just launching a feature, we built an entirely new business line - backed by evidence, defined by fan expectations, and operationalized for growth.