The channel is working towards being distributed on more platforms
By Amanda OYE
TORONTO – OneSoccer is on a mission.
The Toronto-based dedicated soccer channel wants to show soccer can be popular in Canada.
OneSoccer is owned by Mediapro Canada, which itself is the Canadian subsidiary of Spain’s Grupo Mediapro. When Mediapro Canada heard the Canadian Premier League (CPL) was going to be launched, the company took a chance, betting it could make soccer popular in Canada.
“We thought that it could be a really big thing,” said Mediapro Canada CEO Oscar López (right), in an interview with Cartt.ca.
López has been with Mediapro since 2000. He worked in the head office in Madrid for 12 years and has since worked for the company in various locations around North America, ending up in Toronto in 2019 to lead the company’s Canadian operation.
That year, Mediapro Canada acquired broadcast rights for the newly formed CPL, the Canadian Championship and women’s and men’s national team games from the Canadian Soccer Business (CSB), which represents broadcast rights associated with CPL and Canada Soccer.
“With these rights, our strategy was to create a media ecosystem dedicated to soccer and… to be the destination point of soccer in Canada with these three rights as the core of the channel,” López said.
This was the beginning of OneSoccer, which Mediapro Canada created to be the brand its newly acquired rights would air under.
OneSoccer prides itself on being Canadian. The rights they have are Canadian-centric and the majority of their content more generally is Canadian content. This helps serve their goal of wanting to popularize soccer in Canada, but also gives them a unique offering in a competitive environment.
OneSoccer (and Mediapro more generally) also has a strong commitment to gender parity in its programming. They cover both women’s and men’s soccer, with the same production value, and have found both to be successful with audiences.
The plan is to continue to develop OneSoccer with Canadian content and gender equity in mind. Mediapro Canada has the rights through CSB for 10 years from 2019 during which time they want to continue to grow and popularize the sport in the country.
“We knew that Canada is not a soccer country, at least in 2019,” López said. They also knew that in the first two years they would need funding from the Mediapro group to keep OneSoccer going. Because of the pandemic and the disruption it caused in sports, they are considering next year to be the second year.
“Now, I think that we are in the position that we wanted to be on March, 2020,” López said. The national team is in a good place, people are talking about soccer and they have good audiences, he explained.
Next, they are looking to make OneSoccer available on more platforms.
OneSoccer is intended to be platform-agnostic. “We want to be agnostic in terms of distribution because now the market is pretty segmented,” López said. “You have cord cutters and cord nevers… but you have the other part of the audience that are more comfortable with a linear channel in a traditional platform.”
The problem has been timing. They acquired the rights from CSB at the end of February 2019, bought a production company that March and then CPL started a short while later at the end of April.
“The first year was really complicated,” López said. And then the pandemic hit and everything froze, so they are still developing their strategy towards promoting soccer in Canada and becoming well distributed and platform agnostic as though they were in March 2020, he explained.
“So now we are distributed on Telus and then Fubo, an OTT aggregator, and on our DTC (direct-to-consumer), on our OneSoccer platform,” López said.
“We are having conversations with all of the platforms right now,” he said. “We have open conversations with everybody, so, we expect that in March we are going to be distributed on, not all, almost all the platforms and then next (CPL) season will start… so, the idea is to be ready for next season.”
The goal with this all is to become the home of Canadian soccer, said OneSoccer’s head of production, Alba Campabadal (above). “And by now we are that, but we just need more visibility.” Being distributed on all the cable operators is the next step, she said.
Campabadal has worked at Mediapro since 2009 when she joined the company as a technician. After six years in the role, she decided she wanted to do something else and eventually landed in production. She worked in production for Mediapro in Spain for a while and then came to Toronto to help launch OneSoccer and ended up staying.
Campabadal sees the potential of soccer in Canada. “Soccer is getting more popular in Canada in general,” she said. “The demand is there, the money’s there.”
It used to be very difficult to watch soccer in Canada, Campabadal said, and OneSoccer sees itself as a solution to that problem. “You don’t need to go anywhere else. We are here. We have everything that you are interested in,” she said. “The demand is there, and it is growing… you can tell that people are more interested.”
There is also a lot of room for growth at OneSoccer.
“Obviously, there’s a lot to work on,” Campabadal said. “We are just a small channel right now, but… Mediapro has a lot of experience in soccer production and that’s what we are trying to bring here.”
There are 17 people working at OneSoccer, plus people from Mediapro Canada and freelancers.
“We work with a lot of freelancers because Canada is huge, so for me, the most challenging thing is all the logistics and coast to coast coverage,” Campabadal said.
“I’m lucky that everyone is really committed to [OneSoccer] because we need to grow, it’s coming,” she said.
Photos supplied by Mediapro Canada; photo of Campabadal by Nora Stankovic/OneSoccer.
