A new beat at the heart of European Football On 24 August 2001, UEFA is launching its Champions League, UEFA Cup, European new official web site uefa.com. This will be Championships, UEFA Youth, Futsal and the cornerstone of UEFA New Media, the Women’s competitions. arm of UEFA charged with identifying and exploiting new opportunities of the online uefa.com will offer the best UEFA competition world. coverage available online, including live audio streaming of matches, audio round-up shows, The original uefa.com web site was launched video clips of footage, minute-by-minute text on 28 August 1998 for the UEFA Super Cup coverage, photo galleries, match reports and in Monaco (Chelsea FC defeated Real Madrid competition news. CF 1-0). For the past three years, it has provided the most comprehensive coverage A new section of the site, Football Central, is of UEFA’s competitions, being recognised as dedicated to supporting the entire European the most authoritative and trustworthy web football family online. Providing a site on European football with more than 1 comprehensive news service on football million users. In 2000, UEFA produced what across Europe, with stories linking through to remains the most popular football web site FA’s and club’s own sites for more in-depth ever, euro2000.org, delivering 128m pages analysis. This section will include a views in one month, in six languages. comprehensive directory of national associations, leagues and clubs for all the 51 Now, exactly three years after the launch of countries to help drive traffic directly to their the first version, before the FC Bayern site – a true European football portal. München-Liverpool FC UEFA Super Cup game, UEFA is launching the new uefa.com, aiming to be the definitive football website in uefa.com “backstage” exclusives Europe. Providing a comprehensive online resource for fans while supporting national associations, clubs and leagues across the On the web site, for the very first time, football entire European football family. uefa.com will fans will discover all the “football machinery” truly be at the heart of football in Europe. behind the games. The Training Ground section will give access to Europe’s leading coaches – sharing their tactical thoughts and Unbeatable coverage of UEFA their ideas for player development. The site‘s Magazine section will look at the people in competitions and a portal for the football through in-depth features, star football family interviews, and media reviews. The site will offer unparalleled coverage of all On uefa.com, every European football fan will UEFA Competitions, including the UEFA find what they seek: from the simple result hunter to the specialist, researching the tactics of the last UEFA Champions League A strategy for the entire UEFA football final. And of course, UEFA’s access to stars family of the game will allow the fan to have a very direct contact with the world of European football: for example, meeting Gérard Houiller “uefa.com is the arm UEFA needed and for an online chat at the launch event! wanted to secure and develop its web site activities for the benefits of the football family and the fans of European football” says An ambitious organisation for Lennart Johansson, UEFA president. European football’s premier web site “We aim to develop our expertise to utilise the opportunities offered by new technologies, to provide a new online experience for fans and UEFA has set up uefa.com with the ambition real benefits to our members,” underlines of establishing a complete platform able to Gerhard Aigner, UEFA Chief Executive. develop UEFA’s media strategy in order that the European football family benefits from the growing value of Internet, mobile/3G and “NTT Com / VERIO is uniquely positioned to broadband rights as these technologies help uefa.com become the largest sports develop. portal in Europe. Our unrivalled combination of over 110 data centres geographically The web site is the first step in exploiting dispersed across five continents coupled with interactive content in several shapes: mobile our own high performance global Tier-1 IP services (in partnership with Motorola) will network, gives uefa.com the global coverage deliver uefa.com content on WAP, SMS, MMS they need to realize this goal. As the and in the future, GPRS and 3G mobile exclusive hosting infrastructure provider for phones. Content can be also developed for uefa.com, NTT Com VERIO will serve a the needs of interactive television or for worldwide audience with high quality web distribution to other sites. content even during periods of heavy traffic.” said Moos Bulder, President of VERIO uefa.com will have a team of 30 professionals Europe and a network of correspondents covering the 51 countries of the UEFA family in Europe. A completely new platform has been Today is just a start developed with key technology partners. A partnership has been agreed with NTT Com / We have great plans for the future - VERIO, providing hosting and bandwidth for integrating new languages within the web site, the uefa.com platform. NTT Com / VERIO is developing the content over new platforms, the hosting partner for the site and a partner creating tools and services for the football for the UEFA Super Cup and UEFA Cup family – these are just a few illustrations of finals. uefa.com’s forthcoming innovations. uefa.com – a few statistics uefa.com – one of the biggest web sites in Europe uefa.com is being re-launched with the current web site already achieving an average of 20 million page impressions per month and an estimated average of 600’000 unique users per month. Even before re-launch this makes it one of the leading English speaking football web sites in Europe. Young and international audience uefa.com is accessed from all over the world, with 40% of all traffic originating from outside Europe. Over 60% of site visitors are aged between 15-25. Peak traffic during live events Up to 15’000 concurrent users can follow UEFA competition draws. More than 10’000 people listened to a single live audio broadcast during for the UEFA Champions League Final 2001. Fantasy League, hugely successful 137’000 people from over 140 countries registered for the Fantasy League generating, during the course of the last season, an average of 235’000 visits and 4.5 million page impressions per month. uefa.com Senior Management Alexandre Fourtoy – (CEO) Alexandre recently joined uefa.com, having previously worked as General Manager for Sportal in France. He spent time in South America, where he worked on the international development of Canal +, in Belgium working on TV production and establishment of digital TV channels and in France acting as a consultant on the set up of various TV and Internet projects. Alexandre is married and has two sons who, like him support Paris Saint Germain. Arne Rees (Head of Strategic Business Development) Arne recently joined uefa.com in the newly created role of Head of Strategic Business Development. He previously worked in Venture Capital for UBS Capital in London and as Director of Business Development at I-D Media in Berlin. Arne has a German law degree from the University of Passau in Germany, a Masters from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, USA, and a MBA from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausees in Paris. David Farrelly (Editor in Chief) David was appointed uefa.com Editor in Chief in July 2001, having originally- joined UEFA in May 1997 as a member of the then Press and Publications department, with the responsibility of creating and developing UEFA’s online presence. David moved to UEFA from The Financial Times in London, having previously worked for The Irish News in Belfast and The Title in Dublin. He completed a MA in Journalism at Dublin City University in June 1996. .