Zero to 410,000: building a league's social presence from launch.
| client | European League of Football and Hamburg Sea Devils |
| timeframe | 2021 to 2025, from league founding |
| role | Social media lead (league), Head of Media (Sea Devils): strategy, production, team leadership |
| output | 0 to 410,000+ followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and Facebook |
The setting
In 2021 a new professional football league launched in Europe. No audience, no archive, no templates, and a niche sport competing for attention against the biggest brands in sports. The channels had to be built from literally zero, and they had to look established from week one.
I was there from the founding, building the Hamburg Sea Devils' media operations from scratch and running the league's channels as they grew.
The approach
- Platform-specific strategy: one story, five dialects. What works as a TikTok trend dies on Facebook, and vice versa.
- A balanced content mix: informative, viral, emotional and commercial content in deliberate rotation, with enough room left for experiments. In an oversaturated market, the willingness to take content risks is what grows channels.
- Template systems: scores, standings, game weeks, stats, quotes, news. Reusable design systems that made daily output fast and consistent. (See the design door for the systems themselves.)
- Speed as a feature: in sports, timing beats polish. Workflows built so the game-winning moment is published before the stadium stops cheering.
The operation
Growth at this scale is a team sport. I expanded the league's media team from 2 to 5 people, established a league-wide media exchange network covering content creation across Europe, and directed creative teams of 10 to 15 photographers and videographers at championship games.
On event days the operation ran like a newsroom: shot lists, live feeds, instant approvals and publishing decisions in real time. At the 2023 Championship Game alone, the team delivered 50+ live posts in one day while building a complete content archive, with record engagement as the result.
Results & impact
- 410,000+ followers across five platforms, built from zero
- The Sea Devils established as one of the league's most recognizable digital brands
- Record-setting engagement on live event coverage, repeatedly
- Systems that outlived any single season: templates, workflows and a media network still in use
Work with me
I build channels, content systems and the teams that run them, for leagues, clubs and sports brands.