The Big Interview: Oulala

Oulala CEO Valéry Bollier speaks to sportindustry.biz about cracking the European market with an American model, and a recent partnership with Premier League leaders, Leicester City FC…

Tell us about Oulala?

Ten years ago I launched Zeturf, a competitor of the French monopoly of horseracing, from Malta. At the time, I realised that our young customers, largely around 18 to 25, were looking for more than simply a game which allowed them to make a bet, and then wait until the end to find out the result. That young customer base had been brought up with video games, so they were expecting something different to the more traditional customer.

For iGaming operators, going on a new business model where things are unknown is not a straight forward process. It comes with problems, and it makes it very difficult to monetise a sector that has long been the same, but I knew there was potential there. Then I met my business partner who was arriving from the States, who told me that there was this ‘new thing’ and that it was ‘going to be huge’. It didn’t take long for me to realise that what he was talking about, was exactly what I was looking for.

In the UK there are a number of different versions of Fantasy Football platforms, how is Oulala different?

They’re all traditional, even if they’re online. Why do people play fantasy sports? The answer for us is because they want to prove to their friends and to other people that they know the sport better than them. So the game needs to be a game of skill. But with traditional fantasy football platforms, people can play the game with someone who doesn’t know very much about the sport, and that person can still beat them. So with traditional versions of the game, there’s still an element of chance, they are not based on skill.

The problem with fantasy games on the market right now is that players score points based on 5-20 different criteria. For us we felt that this was not enough to be able to be considered a true skill game. Therefore we hired a team of statisticians before launching the game and told them that our game needed to be as close to reality as possible. It took them six months, but they gave us a list of 70 criteria that we had to use, and they advised that we use different weightings for every player on the field.

Once we integrated all of this into our game, we could claim that we were a skill game. But even then we had no proof, so we tested a free version of the game for two years in order to prove we were more accurate than anyone else. When the top players came out on top and scored the most points, we are able to prove that our game was as close to football reality as possible and therefore our game was able to reward users based on their football knowledge – something which has never been seen before in the fantasy football industry.

Secondly, usually the so called “best players” should have the most points at the end of the season. However in others games, that’s not always the case. In our game Messi, Ronaldo, Suarez and Gerard had the most points two seasons ago, and the next season it was Messi, Ronaldo, Hazard and De Bruyne. You may think this is normal, but in the other games, this is not the case.

The third thing, which is the coolest one for us, is that at the beginning of every season you always see two or three unknown players over perform for their respective teams, players who, at the start the season, fans were perhaps unfamiliar with. At the end of every season, those players are then bought by big clubs in Europe for huge amounts of money. For example, this season, Mahrez is the best performing midfielder in Europe based on his statistics and I can bet that at the end of the season he will be sold for a fortune to another club, which again goes to prove how we have utilised “big data” over the last few years to make Oulala the most sophisticated, realistic fantasy football platform available on the market.”

Speaking of Mahrez, you recently signed a deal with Leicester, did you ever possibly expect to see them at the top of the Premier League in December?

The process of signing with teams is always a long one. Last year we had a similar partnership in France and it was a great learning experience for us and gave us an insight into how to create a fair partnership with a football club.

My thoughts are that when most people sign partnerships with a football club, it’s not ‘them’ signing, it’s the kid inside, and therefore this doesn’t always help them to secure the best possible deal. The key thing that we have learnt as an organisation is that it takes time. When we initially started speaking with Leicester, we quickly realised that the partnership could be symbolic for Oulala, however we wanted to gain more from the partnership, than just the ‘wow’ factor that comes with signing with a Premier League Club. Leicester have enjoyed a fantastic start to the season and we believed, from day one, that there were a number of synergies between their business and ours, and that we shared many of the same values.

We wanted to offer Leicester something different and to do that you have to be open minded. Luckily for us they were. It was a long process, but finally we reached a very interesting deal, where visibility is great. But visibility is just the tip of the iceberg. We have a white label of our game running on their site, which is very unusual in our sector and hopefully it will become a very interesting deal for both parties.

What’s the biggest challenge of taking an American model, where they’re very numbers orientated, and making it work in Europe?

Adapting it to a European reality is certainly a challenge. You can’t compare an English consumer, who already plays fantasy football, to a German who doesn’t really know fantasy football but it is very big on statistics and number orientated. In Europe, we still talk about sport with our heart, in an emotional way.  In Paris or Rome, fans will most probably tell you that sport is an art, not a science.

You have to adapt to the reality and it’s a long process, but we know that some Americans would be tempted to come on the European market too. In the US they have some issues now on the market, but they also have a different market to ours because they have multiple products, many mainstream sports and a huge domestic market. We have one single product but the market is the world, because all the biggest players in the world play in Europe. If you are Brazilian you’re going to look at PSG and if you’re Japanese, you’re probably going to look to England – the whole world is looking at us when it comes to football. It’s a very tentative market, yet the learning curve is quite long.

We’ve seen some small competitors copy DraftKings and FanDual, who are the two American leaders. We don’t need to look at them anymore, we know they’re going to fail because it’s simply too ‘American’. We are very different from them and you need to make this effort, it’s an investment and we made this investment for two years.