Company Details
Name: Find a Player Ltd
Date Founded: 2013
Sector: SportsTech/Health & Wellbeing
Key Products/Services: Mobile and web platform for organising sports games, managing teams, discovering players, and simplifying grassroots participation. Includes features such as game management, player matching, availability tracking, and live-mapping of sports activity.
Website URL: www.findaplayer.com
Executive Summary
Find a Player Ltd is a UK-based SportsTech company dedicated to connecting grassroots sports in local areas, making it easier for people to play sport and stay active. Its award-winning platform connects players, teams, and organisers to remove the friction of organising grassroots sport. What makes Find a Player unique is its blend of community-building, live availability tracking, and “on-demand” player matching, similar to how Uber transformed transport.
The company has worked with national governing bodies, local authorities, and major sports brands to improve participation. Recognised as one of the leading innovators in grassroots sport, Find a Player has been highlighted by The Times and Sport England as a model for boosting community engagement.
The Challenge
The problem we set out to solve is simple: making it as easy to find, organise, and play sport as it is to order a cab or a pizza. Whether it’s finding that last player for your five-a-side, joining a new running group, or discovering your local tennis club, getting into sport shouldn’t feel like such a struggle.
It matters because grassroots sport is both vital and vulnerable. Participation underpins physical health, mental wellbeing, and community connection, yet it remains undervalued and under-supported. We all saw the impact when access to sport was removed during Covid — and the truth is, those challenges haven’t gone away.
Our aim is to change the way grassroots sport is supported and delivered: giving organisers and players the tools to cut through the admin, grow participation, and make playing sport part of everyday life again.
The Solution
Our answer is a multi-sided marketplace platform designed to take the hassle out of organising sport.
Find a Player makes it easy to discover games, fill team gaps, and track availability in real time.
For organisers, we handle the heavy lifting: sending invites, tracking numbers, taking payments, managing group chat, and collecting post-activity feedback. It works seamlessly across sports, scales effortlessly for partners through whitelabel solutions, and removes the admin that drives organisers mad. In short — we take care of the boring bits so more people can enjoy the fun bits.
For commercial partners, we offer LiveMap: a full ‘powered-by’, whitelabel solution. LiveMap delivers the entire Find a Player platform and capabilities for partners in their own brand, tailored to their sport, market, and location. It’s a turnkey way to bring world-class participation technology to their community without starting from scratch (which they typically don’t have the skills and resources to deliver).
The Impact
Over the years we’ve listed and supported >11m game and activities, and right now we list around 85,000 activities every week. That data can be segmented and surfaced in countless ways, creating value for a wide range of partners and use cases.
Our biggest challenge isn’t the technology, we’ve won numerous awards for that — it’s shifting an industry that is often very risk-averse and chronically underfunded. Too many organisations are still stuck in a “bowling club” mindset of that’s not how we’ve always done it, which has held back innovation and progression across national governing bodies and grassroots structures alike.
It’s also been a massive struggle trying to attract funding and support into an area which, for some reason, investors don’t seem to be very interested in (most sports tech investment goes into business related to Elite sports – principally playing or watching).
Future Plans
Over the past year, we’ve been heavily focused on launching a US-licensed version of our product, LFG Connect. This is in partnership with a group of seasoned US entrepreneurs, including two EVPs at Fanatics (market cap: $32bn). Their ambition is bold — they’re targeting a nine-figure exit within the next two to three years — and we’re right in the thick of it.
At the same time, we’re exploring how our technology can connect global supporter groups for elite sports clubs, including several Premier League teams. The numbers behind this model are extremely compelling, and our current priority is to prove it with a couple of partners before scaling it out across multiple countries and sports.
From a marketing standpoint, though, we’re guilty of being typically Scottish: great at building solutions and solving problems, but not so great at shouting about them. Our hope is to become one of those “overnight success” stories — the kind where the company suddenly seems to blow up, despite having quietly grafted away for years.
Right now, we’re a bit of a “slept on” business in what is also a hugely undervalued industry — which means the upside is enormous. Too often, people think of us as just “that wee app that helps you find the last guy for your five-a-side,” when in reality we’re building a global, multi-sided sports network capable of generating and commercialising vast amounts of sports and activity data.
Our vision is to become the LinkedIn or Facebook of sport — the go-to platform that underpins how people connect, play, and participate. With the right resources and a bigger team, we can finally give this product the scale and visibility it deserves.