Leo MacLehose and Dominic Collingwood met on their first day of school, aged 13, sitting in the same row for double biology; by the weekend they were both playing in the second row in the rugby team; now, aged 30, they run MatchPint, the app that connects fans and pubs. “We didn’t win a game in our first season,” Collingwood recalls. “But we had a great last season. We’re resilient and dogged.”
I meet them at their HQ in Finsbury Square, London, where all the talk is of the first matches of the new Premiership season. MacLehose, who is half-French and half-Scottish, says that he was inspired by an experience of once trying to find a pub to watch a French rugby game, but in vain. “I knew it would be showing somewhere, I just didn’t know where.” Now you can find the most esoteric game you can imagine not too far from your door. MacLehose proved the point by showing me the best location for watching a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and Oakland Athletic – “and it’s 8 minutes walk from here!” QED.
MacLehose and Collingwood both cheerfully accept that they are privileged white guys. They went to the King’s School, Canterbury, one of the oldest in the country. In the “Young Entrepreneurs” class they made boxer shorts in their house colours and sold them for a fiver. MacLehose went on to study international business and economics at the University of Manchester while Collingwood became a choral scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied theology and was frequently called upon to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in a counter-tenor voice. “A knowledge of medical ethics and the ability to sing Handel arias are not obvious qualifications for a business career,” says Collingwood. But the two of them remained good friends, bonded not so much by playing sports together as by watching them in pubs.
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Collingwood did a stint as a door-to-door Sky TV salesman. “I’m only responsible for about three dishes,” he says. Meanwhile MacLehose was working in a bar in Paris during the Rugby World Cup. “The place was rammed for every game and I had to stand on the bar singing the Marseillaise,” he recalls. “It was the best spot to view the game from.” This, in 2007, may have been the “light-bulb moment”.
The two co-founders argue that nearly all contemporary online businesses started out as a list on Craigslist. “MatchPint is like an in-depth version of Most Popular Sports Bars,” says MacLehose. They describe their business as like organising a party, which needs a lot of hard work to get it right. It was a slog at the beginning. Collingwood says, “It was like Uber, but with only one car.” They started out knocking on the doors of pubs in London, asking if they were interested in being on their app. People weren’t queueing up to invest and they worked out of a flat in London. They still remember their first pub to sign up with affection: The Bowler in Clerkenwell, in September 2011.
MatchPint provides information to fans, but it also offers a platform to pubs to make their lives easier. The Albion, a Young’s pub on New Bridge Street near Blackfriars in London, was another of the pubs they recruited in the first week. The landlord was Canadian and they were showing a lot of Canadian ice hockey. But how many people knew that? “They were also big on rugby and football,” says MacLehose. “But organising it all and marketing it was laborious and a huge drain on their time. We said, if we could provide you with a platform that enables you to do in five minutes what you’re spending hours on, would you be interested?”
Pubs also pay between £10,000 and £40,000 per annum for the rights to show live sports. They are eager to get a return on the investment.
“The reason we remain passionate about this business is simple,” says MacLehose. “You can take anyone who isn’t even a fan and put them in a pub and get them watching the final over of the Cricket World Cup and it’s impossible for them not to be caught up in the euphoria.” Sport, he argues, is unscripted theatre. “Come on, even Shakespeare couldn’t have scripted Zinedine Zidane headbutting Materazzi in the World Cup final.”
MatchPint is an online business but offering an offline experience. “We don’t want people glued to their phones all the time,” says Collingwood. “It’s too passive.” He asks me to name my high-point sports memories. I hark back to being at the 1998 World Cup in France, seeing Beckham sent off against Argentina or France beat Brazil in the final. “You see,” says Collingwood, “no one remembers the time they watched a game on their own, sitting on the sofa. You need to be surrounded by friends and other people.”
It may not always be possible to get to the match itself. If you want to watch the Chicago Cubs it’s a hell of a commute. And getting in to watch West Ham (my team) is not cheap either. “The pub is the perfect hybrid experience,” says MacLehose. “You have the stadium atmosphere without the expense.” He also reckons it’s a great leveller. “You can walk into a pub in Sheffield and it doesn’t matter if you’re a big shot company executive or the school cleaner, you all want England to beat Germany.”
As its name suggests, MatchPint has linked up with big brands like Heineken, Guinness, and Budweiser. And it is now expanding around the world. It recently bought its French counterpart, Allomatch, it launched in Ireland earlier this year, and in December it is kicking off in Australia.
My attention was particularly attracted by the “Premier Predictor” on the app. Rather than betting, this enables you to engage with other fans by predicting the outcome of games. On the phone, West Ham were expected to draw 2-2 with Manchester City in their big season opener. It’s a shame they didn’t quite manage to pull it off on the day. With the game having been sold out, I’m sure that many were following the match in a pub somewhere in London and having a drink to drown their sorrows.