JF Sports Consulting founder, Joao Frigerio – who’s also the founder and CEO of iWorkinSport – was recently interviewed by PlayKnox, a website specialised on sports business, branding and marketing news from the global realm, with a specific focus on the Indian market.
Read below part of the interview. To read the whole interview, click here.
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc across the globe and sports is one of the worst affected industry. However, things are slowly improving as the world is opening up. We spoke with founder of iWorkinSport founder Joao Frigerio to find out the challenges of the sports job sector, diversity among other things.
What promoted you to start iWorkinSport?
I think that what brought us to create iWorkinSport was the realisation that an event designed to connect recruiters with qualified talent focused in sport didn’t exist in Europe. The idea for a job fair focused in the sports industry came up from conversations with friends at the FIFA Master, when I was still working for Sportcal I think that was in 2010. I think that Dr. Kevin Tallec Marston was the one who first presented the idea to me – at that time they wanted to know if Sportcal would be interested in organising such an event. That didn’t happen. A few years later I was consulting for the FIFA Master, supporting the students on their career development, and because of that, I was contacting and creating relationships with recruiters and HR professionals in the industry. At that time, I had my own company and already had experience in organising events, so I revived the idea and invited other programmes, such as the AISTS, Johan Cruyff Institute, University of Liverpool and the EU Business School to join and launch the first event of its kind. They all supported the idea. On the other hand, the five organisations who first bought the idea and signed up with us were: FIFA, UEFA, the IOC, adidas and the NBA. I knew that with them on board, other companies would sign up too and the event could be a success.
What are the challenges you are facing due to COVID19? How are you overcoming the same?
The main challenge is the impossibility to organise in-person events, as well as the fact that many companies stopped hiring and, therefore, were not looking to participate in a job fair.
Having said that, I think we suffered a little less than other companies because we were already prepared to organise digital events when the world shut down in March 2020. In early 2019 we announced we would be organising virtual events, and we launched the first one in December that year.
So, when the pandemic hit, we could quickly turn our physical event, scheduled for the beginning of May, into a digital one. And since we were one of the only events happening in the world at that time, we received a lot of attention. Since then, we’ve been increasing our digital presence. We have organised another three virtual events, and we have launched a live interview series, which has been quite successful too.
To read the rest of the interview, click here.