Company joins the old Ypiranga with the intention of forming the world’s first hybrid club

When football was in its infancy in Brazil, Clube Atlético Ypiranga was a pioneer. Created in 1906, it is one of the founders of the São Paulo Football Federation (1941) and vice state in 1913, 1935 and 1936. The relegation to the second division in 1958 ended the professional modality in the association, which remains only as a social club.

Sixty-four years later, a company in partnership with Ypiranga and an almost identical name intends to resurrect the association’s football. Cia Ipiranga, a corporation, has partnered with Ypiranga for futsal and youth categories. These will use the traditional team’s uniforms and shield. Not professionally. It will be Ipiranga with “I”, not with “Y”.

“Ypiranga put in the statute that they can’t have more professional teams. I played there, my brother too, we’re from the neighborhood and have a great relationship with the board”, says former striker Paulo Jamelli, who passed through Santos and São Paulo, one of the company’s executives.

With the idea of ​​debuting in 2023 (although the futsal team already stamps the company’s brand on the uniform), the new Ipiranga looks like other football projects. He will look for players, work in the market, go after money and chose the city of São Paulo because he believes there is room for one more team.

But there are other ideas that don’t necessarily involve winning football matches. It is an enterprise in which the score of the matches can be in the background.

“I wouldn’t go into a traditional football project. It would be more of the same. Our DNA is to deliver technology. Our business is different. The result on the field cannot be above the operational result”, says José Rozinei da Silva, in charge of the technology of the SAF (Sociedad Anónima do Futebol).

Operating income is profit.

Ipiranga has so many ambitions that the sport itself, as the public is used to seeing, may be off the priority list of its creators. At least there is no concern about what the fans will think about it, since the club is born with zero fans. The words innovation and eSports may come to the forefront of football.

For the executives, Cia Ipiranga, with the partnership in the basic categories with the old Ypiranga, is the first hybrid club in the world.

“There are three aspects. The objective is not to be dependent on traditional football, sponsorship and player sales. We seek another line of approach. We want to take football from the 20th century and put it in the 21st century”, says Calucho Jamelli, brother of Paul.

Associated with the company Total Player, owned by the same owners, Ipiranga develops technologies, applications and programs for evaluating football players. These are projects that already exist on the market, to assess whether an athlete with certain characteristics will fit into which team. There is the idea of ​​having a kind of passport to determine how much each athlete is worth. Find out why one player tends to value themselves more than another and how to maximize that.

The club could develop the technology for itself and use it to discover talent. But the idea is to sell it to other clubs. Put this in the hands of the competition for a fee.

Ipiranga wants to create NFTs, digital representations of unique assets to be sold. You can even do them for other teams. Total Player made Atlético Mineiro’s “token”.

“Traditional clubs are very limited. What we realized is that the tools of technology companies used in any business, in the financial market, can be applied in the world of sports, and nobody uses it. It’s a matter of having information. Ipiranga has the information”, explains Rozinei.

The question is whether football is ready for so much technology or for innovations that have changed the way the industry has worked for decades.

“The world of football is today as banks were ten years ago. Bank fintechs were innovative five years ago. Today they are commonplace. But the minds of football entrepreneurs are not ready for that. It is very difficult to change the concept” , he recognizes.

Since the birth of the project, the mission has been to go after investors. Explain the project, show why it would work. Showing that it is similar to investing in agribusiness, a comparison that is strange at first.

“Instead of a guy investing in agribusiness, in dollars, in gold, he will invest in football with the same security. This is what we pass on to people in the financial market. It takes work to make them understand. the message to the public that it’s just another football team. It’s not. It’s more than that”, swears Paulo Jamelli.

And another bet is eSports. Ipiranga’s belief is in the growth of virtual games in the country. In a similar way to what happens in the United States.

“It’s the future. Kids would rather watch a video game than watch a real game”, concludes Rozinei.
Technology, innovation, eSports, business with other clubs, NFT, token, blockchain, virtual reality and even football are in Ipiranga’s plans.

“We know we have to do something different from everything else. We can get all this demand from players who don’t have a market, but live in the capital of São Paulo and Greater São Paulo. There is a lot of idle player because of the Brazilian calendar”, concludes Paulo Jamelli.