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Tom Thirlwall, Chief Executive Officer
The Interview
Giving Fans Their Ball Back COPA90
How do you take on the sports media giants with
a launch budget of US$3m? You have to win on
a far more elemental and emotional level, says
the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of COPA90, a sports media challenger that has taken football news and analysis out of the dull TV studio, and immersed itself and its stories into the heart
of football fan culture.
Tom Thirlwall talks about the journey so far, and why he believes the biggest danger to a media challenger is ‘dancing in the traffic’.
How did COPA90 start?
Before we branded ourselves COPA90, we were called Bigballs Films. Back then, there were four of us in a loft on Wardour Street in Soho, London. We’d built a reputation for making premium, cool, youth-focused content in the worlds of football and action sports, and we knew how to tell stories in three or four minutes, and that suited that early short-form content-making aesthetic.
That’s when we were invited by YouTube to tender for US$3m to launch a football channel on its platform. We went in and said ‘Audiences are getting their football games from wherever they
w
Tom Thirlwall, at COPA90’s studios in London.
68 People's Champion