It was created in the Algarve thinking about the difficulties that small sports clubs face, but it is still very useful for clubs of national and even international level. The Emjogo.pt software is already used by around 400 institutions across the country and its creator plans to start expanding across borders.
It is at the UAlg Tec Campus, in Faro, which is part of the team responsible for the In Game, including Gil Guilherme, the founder of the company We Sport IT, comes together on a daily basis to work.
Currently, there are already half a dozen computers spread out in the company's workspace, on the University of Algarve's Penha Campus, to which other "hands" are added, spread across various parts of the country. In all, there are 14 employees of the company, including programmers, commercial department and administrative sector.
«Emjogo is a management and communication software for sports clubs, which seeks to organize, centralize and unify the work that is done within the club, on a daily basis», explained Gil Guilherme, founder and executive director of the company that produces this tool. , to Sul Informação.
This means that each element of the staff of the club «has access to an easy-to-use tool to access, manage, analyze and record their work».
«Coaches, for example, record information from games and training, physiotherapists from treatments, exams, injuries, and so on, in relation to each of the elements of the staff», illustrated Gil Guilherme.
There is also the possibility for different departments to collaborate with each other. «If the physiotherapist says that the athlete is injured and that the break time is two weeks, the coach knows that he cannot count on the athlete in the next training sessions and games».
At the moment, there are around 400 clubs using this , including «Portimonense, but also Marítimo, Santa Clara, Tondela, Gil Vicente, Casa Pia and Boavista», all of them from the I League. Another club that uses Emjogo is Moreirense, who were relegated to the II Liga at the end of last season.
In these cases, the company does not work “with the main team”, but “with the training part”, that is, “with the club itself and not with the Sociedade Anónima Desportiva”.
But the bulk of the Algarve company's clients are smaller clubs. «We work from the most local club possible, totally amateur, to clubs with national and international dimension, professionals», explained Gil Guilherme.
“Mostly, they are clubs with team sports, which are our preferred target. Most are football clubs, but we also work with futsal, basketball, handball, rugby. We also have individual sports, like dance, martial arts, gymnastics, and so on”, he revealed.
Gil Guilherme assumes that he created Emjogo thinking, to a large extent, of these more local clubs, which are also the ones that most need this type of tool.
«Our vision and our mission is to enhance the value that clubs have, regardless of their size or visibility. And a lot of that value is in your community. Thus, the idea of creating websites for sports clubs arose, as a way of promoting the club and bringing it closer to its community».
However, the programmer-turned-entrepreneur did not have the success he had hoped for. «There were few clubs that embraced the need for the site. But at the same time, this process allowed us to understand what they needed. We were even a little further ahead, in relation to the needs of the clubs, which were much more basic, in terms of the institution's internal management».
In this way, at the end of 2018, Emjogo emerged, a management system that has been constantly evolving since then.
«The company was created in 2017, but we had already been working with the clubs for two years. We already had a product and customers and we felt the need to create the company to have something more structured and solid to reach the clubs», he said.
At first, it was all in the individual name. «I am the only founder, I started alone. My background it's a programmer. I took the computer course here at the University of Algarve. I'm not from here, I was born in Porto and grew up on Margem Sul, in Corroios. Came to Faro study and then I stayed here”.
Despite having training in computers, Gil was “always connected to sport. I was a federated athlete, I started studies in the field of sport, but then I switched to computing because I saw that I had a better future and I liked it».
«Emjogo turns out to be the result of these two passions of mine and, mainly, of my desire to be able to contribute something of value and that enhances what clubs do, because, for me, the people who work in these institutions do a spectacular job , most of them voluntarily. They should receive a medal at the end of each year!”, believes the businessman.
In the future, and at a time when the daily operation in Portugal is already «quite controlled», the person in charge of Emjogo is already thinking about new markets, but always taking safe steps.
“We try to grow organically. In other words, as we have more clubs, we can make new bets, to develop more , in more human resources for customer follow-up. It is slower growth, but more solid and with validation», he added.
As for the possibility of exporting this , which has a Portuguese and an English version, the company has already started «doing market research, to understand how it works, what exists and whether the type of customer is the same as in Portugal or not».
«We believe that, by the end of the year, we will have this data», concluded Gil Guilherme, who says that, in the future, he intends to «maintain the main operation here in the Algarve».
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