Institute for Sport Business PhD student leads digital transformation at Club Atlético Banfield

Fede Winer studies within our Institute for Sport Business and his research explores how different technologies can help the esports ecosystem to create more accurate data.

In his newly appointed role as Chairman at the football club, Fede has helped launch several new digital services through the Banfield.Tech platform.

With the aim of providing technology solutions to all areas of the institution, the initiative looks to address the following criteria:

FANDOM: Centre the club on people through unique experiences, facilitating access to the Banfield family regardless of their culture or geographic location.

REVENUE: Nurture new sources of income with partners from the creation and licensing of content, services, and products.

INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT): Promote the adoption of intelligent and interconnected devices that generate sources of information in real-time to make decisions based on data.

PERFORMANCE: Help athletes and technicians in the adoption of processes, devices, and analytics that benefit them in professional competition.

EDUCATION: Promote technological training programmes, such as critical thinking and coding.

ASSETS: Increase the presence of digital assets in crypto, smartcontracts, videogaming and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) (a unit of data).

Fede Winer has said:

“It’s the technological strategy, and not the technology, that should drive the digital transformation process. That is why within our platform, Banfield.Tech, we lead and play a crucial role maturing a club culture that embraces change, risk-taking, and collaboration. We are capable of transforming business processes in Sports and Entertainment thanks to the force of 30+ volunteers from five countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Switzerland, Austria, and Romania) who enthusiastically joined a project.

There are other clubs pouring millions into IT/innovation departments, but those projects are, in general, soulless. At Banfield.Tech we have a trademark doctrine, embracing open-source software, open data politics, and win-win partnerships with developers, entrepreneurs, startups and firms. We follow agile procedures and lean management, applying full transparency to our collective actions.”

Fede then went onto say:

“Investing in technology isn’t the same as digital transformation (DT). DT does not have an end goal but is a continuous evolving technique. Data analysis revealed communication as the largest issue. The data silos and existing channels were simply not ready to run at the speed of current business. We made an agreement with Kandra Labs to promote an open-source chat system for teams. 20% of the workforce adopted it and saved over 50% of their communication task time per day, which we have quantified to 30,000 USD per month once the whole club adopts it. It is a 5% improvement for the annual budget of the organisation (14M USD).”

Banfield’s volunteers can also propose projects to the pipeline and the club are working on 10 initiatives for 2021. These include:

• A Digital Twin model for performance analytics in three of the twelve club sport disciplines
• Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), connecting club memorabilia with artists that wish to sign these pieces digitally
• A new cloud server for video performance analytics in Banfield Women
• Two video games inspired by the history of the club and the city. Last year, the team created ‘Banfield Penalty Challenge’, which obtained 25K downloads from 42 countries
• A book to promote coding amongst children and a virtual academy to acquire technology knowledge curated by professors
• A new statistics and documentary archive section in the cloud

Banfield also aims to continue its strong relationships with universities across the world.

Fede explains:

“We are in talks with different European and South American universities to offer a wide range of benefits, with a focus on the links into the innovation ecosystem. We need researchers to overcome the challenges of modern sport business and the synergies with educational institutions are strategic. We hope to present the first projects by Q4 2021".

The club hopes to connect supporters through these unique digital experiences regardless of their culture or geographic location.

To find out more about our Institute for Sport Business PhD opportunities, please visit this page.