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World's first independent FIFA Academy
Team Gullit

World's first independent FIFA Academy

About Team Gullit

Team Gullit is the world’s first independent FIFA academy. The team offers promising talents professional guidance and training to help them take their game to the next level. Besides, the academy guides its talents in dealing with social media and building their personal brand.

Founded

2018

Website

World's first

When Team Gullit launched at the start of 2018, talented FIFA-players had a difficult time breaking through internationally without being part of a professional football club. There was so much talent, but such a small percentage of the players actually made it to the big stage. For us, that needed to change. Team Gullit was the solution.

Team Gullit is the world’s first independent academy focused on the game FIFA. The team offers promising talents professional guidance and training to help them take their game to the next level. Besides, the academy guides its talents in dealing with social media and building their personal brand.

In an industry dominated by professional football clubs and esports organizations, Team Gullit is unique. It’s the first team in the esports scene to embrace a retired ‘legendary’ football player, bridging the gap between real sports and virtual sports.

Dutch talent Dani wins edivisie
Dutch talent Dani wins edivisie

Talent Development

What sets Team Gullit apart from other esports organizations is the focus on talent development. The academy supports its talents through training and coaching to become a better player. Team Gullit has crafted a team consisting of a performance coach and multiple professional FIFA coaches to guarantee that the academy is the Walhalla for up-and-coming FIFA talents.

To ensure Team Gullit stays on top of their game, the team has created a training module. The module is primarily based on video analysis and has a lot of similarities with real-life football. The coaches analyze the games that the talents play and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. These findings are then discussed in an online feedback session, resulting in a detailed training program.

Partnerships and Results

Experience is key. To get the talents as much relevant experience as possible, Team Gullit teamed up with multiple professional football clubs. The academy boasts the most talented young FIFA players in the world, and the clubs are allowed to compete in relevant national competitions. An incredibly valuable deal for both parties. So far, Team Gullit has teamed up with AZ Alkmaar, Heerenveen, ADO Den Haag, BK Häcken, and more.

Besides competing on a national level, the talents represent Team Gullit in the FIFA Global Series. The Global Series brings together the best competitors from around the world to compete across five continents. Since its launch, Team Gullit is one of the most successful teams in this circuit.

The academy has won two FUT Champions Cups, competed at the FIFA eWorld Cup, was a semi-finalist in the eChampions League, and won the Dutch eDivisie. Two of the talents have made massive transfers and now compete for esports giant Ninjas in Pyjamas and Portuguese football club SL Benfica.

Building a community

Besides developing its own players, Team Gullit educates the FIFA community on their social media platforms. The team creates a unique mix of content, for both the casual and competitive players. By sharing gameplay clips, tutorials, tips and tricks, and player and team analysis posts, Team Gullit has grown into one of the most prominent FIFA-related pages. The academy now has a community of over 100.000 followers, boasting incredible monthly growth and engagement rates.

Getting brands involved

The Team Gullit community consists of young people that are typically hard to reach. The majority of these followers are under 30 years of age and are hard to target by using traditional marketing. By partnering with Team Gullit and by naturally integrating the brand or products in the social media feed or coming up with creative campaigns, companies succeed in reaching their target audience.

So far, Team Gullit has teamed up with companies such as Red Bull, KPN, BenQ. Most of these partnerships revolve around creating brand awareness. In some cases, brand awareness is being produced by having visibility on social media. In other cases, both parties try to develop creative concepts to grab the target audience’s attention. A great example - Team Gullit and Red Bull organized the #STAYATHOMECUP during the corona crisis lockdown.