SEGG Media Expands Soccerex Partnership, Positioning Sports.com at Center of Global Football Deal Ecosystem

Sports business partnerships: SEGG Media locks in 3-year Soccerex deal as Sports.com becomes football deal hub

James Okafor | GlobalBeat

SEGG Media signed a three-year extension Monday that makes its Sports.com platform the official digital partner of Soccerex, locking access to 2,500 football clubs and 40,000 executives across the convention circuit.

The deal gives SEGG exclusive rights to stream Soccerex panels and broker one-on-one meetings between clubs, leagues and sponsors through its matchmaking software.

Sports.com will livestream 18 Soccerex events annually from Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, replacing the previous fragmented Zoom links with a single interface where rights holders can pitch inventory and investors can submit term sheets. SEGG chief executive Marcus Haley told reporters the platform processed $340 million in football transactions last year and expects the Soccerex integration to triple that volume by 2027.

“We are not running another webinar,” Haley said during a press call from Soccerex’s Miami headquarters. “Every stream carries a deal room. If Flamengo wants a sleeve sponsor, they post the spec, set a reserve price and qualified brands bid in real time while the panel runs.”

Soccerex founder Duncan Revie said the partnership ends the industry’s reliance on “business-card roulette” in hotel lobbies. Under the new terms, SEGG pays Soccerex an undisclosed seven-figure annual fee plus 8% commission on any deal closed through Sports.com within 90 days of an event. Revie added that 420 club owners or sporting directors attended the last convention in Johannesburg, creating what he called “a captive boardroom.”

The first integrated event will be Soccerex Europe in Prague this September, where SEGG technicians have installed fibre lines into the Congress Centre so that rights packages for the 2027-30 cycle can be auctioned live. Haley said major agencies such as IMG, Infront and Pitch International have already reserved virtual booths, while Serie A and the EFL will list partial inventory to test price elasticity.

Brazilian second-tier club Guarani became the beta user last month, selling back-of-shirt inventory to a fintech start-up for $1.2 million after a 12-minute stream that drew 47 accredited buyers. Guarani commercial director Ricardo Mansur told reporters the club paid Soccerex a $25,000 listing fee and SEGG a 5% success commission, still saving around $100,000 against traditional broker margins.

Background

Soccerex began in 1995 as a trade show at London’s Wembley Stadium, born from Revie’s frustration that football executives lacked a neutral venue to negotiate sponsorships and TV rights. The brand has since staged 67 events in 22 cities, claiming to have facilitated more than $8 billion in deals, including Chevrolet’s $559 million shirt partnership with Manchester United in 2012 and Yokohama’s $200 million agreement with Chelsea three years later.

SEGG Media launched Sports.com in 2021 after acquiring the domain from Microsoft in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $28 million. The company originally built fantasy games for Fox Sports, then pivoted to deal-making tools when the US Supreme Court struck down the federal sports betting ban in 2018. SEGG now earns 70% of revenue from transaction fees, with the rest split between subscriptions and advertising.

What’s Next

Prague will serve as the public unveiling, but SEGG engineers are already coding white-label versions of the deal room for CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation, who want to run private marketplaces for their own commercial programmes. Haley said the goal is to have 50 federations hosting digital rights exchanges on Sports.com infrastructure before the 2026 World Cup kicks off in North America.

The enlarged partnership exposes Sports.com to an estimated $4 billion in annual football inventory that changes hands outside the headline rights held by broadcasters, from stadium naming deals to sleeve patches and TikTok content licenses. Haley warned traditional agencies that still rely on personal relationships: “If your value-add is a black book, we just digitised it and added a bidding engine.”