Why we invested in Coachbetter

The opportunity

Grassroots football is a globally important community institution, yet one of the least supported by technology. FIFA's member associations collectively span more than 300,000 clubs, generally run by volunteers who give up significant time each week to keep the game going. In England alone, 1.4 million people volunteer every week to support, maintain and keep grassroots football alive. The average club secretary spends 10+ hours a week on admin tasks that could take a fraction of the time; coaches plan sessions in spreadsheets, chase attendance over WhatsApp, and manage payments through text messages.

At the other end, large professional clubs and national federations have invested heavily in coaching methodology but lack the digital infrastructure to distribute it. Borussia Dortmund, a Coachbetter customer, whose BVB Evonik Football Academy spans over 200 coaches across 35 countries, previously had no scalable way to transfer its coaching philosophy to partner clubs abroad, relying on delegations physically travelling from Dortmund to train coaches on the ground.

What is Coachbetter?

Coachbetter is an operating system for football clubs. The platform gives coaches the tools to plan sessions from a library of over 700 activities, manage teams and matchdays, run video analysis, and access UEFA-certified coaching education, all in one place. For clubs, it centralises member management, coach oversight, and communications. CoachbetterPay extends the platform into financial infrastructure, handling membership fees, one-off costs, and payment collection for clubs that have historically relied on manual processes and chased missed payments through personal messages.

The platform serves both ends of the market simultaneously. For grassroots volunteers, it removes the administrative burden that makes community football hard to sustain. For larger clubs and federations, it provides the technology layer needed to distribute coaching standards and methodology consistently across global networks. For example, the DFB, the world's largest sports federation, with over 8 million members and 24,000 clubs, has become both a strategic investor and commercial partner, with the ambition for Coachbetter to serve as the central digital platform for all grassroots football clubs in Germany.

The product impact is measurable. Coaches save more than four hours a week on planning and administration. Clubs reduce accounting workload by more than six hours per week and report a 32% improvement in on-time payments.

Three things convinced us to invest (and to reinvest in the latest round):

1. A founder with domain insight and institutional access. Patrick Patzig spent several years as a strategy manager at FIFA after a career as a semi-professional footballer. That experience gave him a clear-eyed view of how the game is actually organised at every level of the pyramid.
2. Coaches love using the platform, more than 10,000 coaches worldwide now use Coachbetter. There is also a strong network effect, as more players and parents join, the platform becomes more valuable for everyone, and clubs become more reluctant to leave.
3. Coachbetter has systematically expanded from coaching and team management into UEFA-certified coach education, club administration, and now financial infrastructure through CoachbetterPay, each layer deepening the platform's role in how clubs actually operate. The DFB (the world's largest sports federation) becoming both an investor and commercial partner, with the ambition for Coachbetter to become the central digital platform for all grassroots football in Germany, is proof that this model can work at national scale.

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At Brighteye, we invest in companies that help people learn, develop, and work better, and that build the infrastructure enabling those things to happen at scale. Coachbetter does this for the coaches and volunteers who run community football, and for the players who benefit when those coaches spend less time on admin and more time on the pitch, armed with world-class training content. We are proud to continue supporting Coachbetter alongside the DFB, Swiss Founders Fund, ZEN11, and an exceptional group of investors who bring deep credibility to the sport.

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