Courtesy of Footlab
Footlab — the AI-powered soccer entertainment and performance franchise billed as a marriage of "eSports, real-life soccer, and cutting-edge technology" — is coming to America.
A Footlab World location is planned for Orange County, California, and is expected to open next year. The venue will be over 165K square feet and sit on five acres.
Cristiano Ronaldo is among Footlab’s owners; this location will be opened in partnership with Stake Investors. Footlab has existing facilities in Dubai, Portugal and Kazakhstan.
Highlights:
five premium acres, combining multiple indoor and outdoor fields
Single and multiplayer stations deliver interactive experiences for athletes and casual players alike
Neutral, club-independent environment welcoming youth players, adult leagues, families, and corporate teams
Special events, tournaments, and brand activations
The concept is interesting — more focused on actual sport development and training than TopGolf, but more embracing of the entertainment angle than Shoot 360.
And hitting these shores right as World Cup Mania kicks into overdrive.
Reminds me of Valhalla FC Arena.
Lots of interesting concepts in the “sportstainment” category— from TopGolf, to Batbox, to Footlab, to Shoot360, to the F1 Arcade. Some franchises, some not.
I could absolutely see these venues as an amazing place to have kids birthday parties. My kids have had their last 3 combined birthdays at a sports facility with turf and basketball courts. An instructor organizes pickup games of the kids’ choosing - usually wiffleball or soccer - and then leads everyone in to a room that smells like the inside of an industrial-strength carpet cleaner for pizza and to blow out candles.
Everyone loves it. But the experience is no frills. The “professionalized” experiences for birthday parties are generally reserved for more harrowing trampoline parks and the like. So count me in on higher-end sportstainment facilities for this use.
But I do think that for every successful sportstainment concept, there will be 4 that go belly-up for various reasons. As an example, TopGolf has gotten itself into trouble largely because of the real estate costs involved in each facility, never mind the insane decision to allow kids birthday parties to be on the third deck of their venues.
The bigger opportunity seems to be for existing sports facilities and tournament locations to add the tech, systems, and food and beverage offerings that many of these newer venues include. This is why I’m bullish on the asset-light platform model like Batbox (licensed simulator) and scaled hospitality plays that can elevate things at the places where athletes and parents are already spending time. Those businesses come without the fixed costs and operational headaches of running a whole facility.
Still, Footlab looks cool and I want one.
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