The first ever edition of WFS Live powered by R9 came to an end on Friday July 10th with a unique live conversation with FIFA President Gianni Infantino. Football’s global chief shared his views on the current state of the football industry and his plans to continue growing and globalising the game in the coming years, despite the significant challenges that lie ahead due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The chat between Infantino and O Fenômeno was the icing on the cake of a unique event that featured 37 conferences in three different languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese) with up to 158 top-notch speakers. These international leaders shared their knowledge and experience with the sole objective of finding the best ways to overcome the unprecedented challenges that the global sports industry is facing.
If unity is an essential requirement to face the post-Covid era, and everyone agrees it is, then there’s no doubt that the football industry is in a much better position to overcome the challenges ahead after WFS Live, the largest event the football industry has seen in 2020. Figures prove that WFS’ first online was much more than its Conference Programme. It was a global networking and knowledge-sharing platform that brought together the entirety of the industry like never before.
Our 3,407 attendees from 120 different countries made over 10,000 contacts (4,3 contacts per active user), created 10,700+ discussions and exchanged 22,000+ messages. The conversations were clearly fruitful, as video-calls went on for an average of over 45 minutes and attendees rated each other with an average of 4,8/5. 85 percent of the attendees that were rated scored 5 Starts, the highest possible rating.
WFS Live became one of the main talking points across the global industry during the entire week, generating over 1 million impressions on social media (640,000 on Twitter) and 15,000 engagements.
“I’m very grateful to the more than 3,000 participants from all the continents, the 158 speakers who debated for 5 days very important and relevant topics for the entire industry and to the sponsors who joined us on our dream to connect the football industry virtually. You collaborated directly with the NGOs Common Goal and Fundação Fenômenos,” said Ronaldo in his final closing speech.
“When we started this project our mission was to develop a useful platform to allow the football industry to come together in these difficult times in which we are forced to be apart due to the pandemic. The remarkable figures achieved during the past week prove that we fulfilled our objective and I’m happy and proud to say that today the football industry is more united and therefore in a better position to face whatever challenges may lie ahead. I would like to thank all the attendees for participating and all our partners for supporting us in this new project that we expect to grow and improve in the coming months,” said WFS Director Jan Alessie.