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Nordensa, a Romanian-headquartered startup with a drive to discover and support young talents from unexplored countries, is giving power to football fans by making them help sign players to European clubs.
While football continues to make advancements on various fronts, a lot still remains to be achieved, like the story of 20-year-old Cameroonian talent Joseph Iyendjock, who reportedly made history in July 2023, by becoming the first fan-backed player to sign for a European club.
Giving Real Power To The Fans
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But while that might just be a catchy phrase for some, Nordensa, a Romanian-headquartered startup with a drive for discovering and supporting young football talents from unexplored countries, thought to disrupt the industry, giving actual power to the fans by making them help sign players to European clubs.
"Some of the biggest superstars we should know about, we will never know their names," Nordensa's CEO and Founder Adrian Docea said, in a conversation with Pulse Sports, "...and that is the saddest thing in football. That is the story we are trying to fix."
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"This is the first company in the world and the history of football that will allow fans to be part of football as backers, supporters, owners, because that's the biggest thing in football that is not being solved when it comes to fans.
"Everyone wants to build the next big fan engagement app, we didn't want to do just another fan engagement app, but a fan ownership app. There is nothing on planet Earth that has more fans than football. We identified the ownership bit."
For Nordensa, Iyendjock proved to be a successful test case, as in just under 10 days, €18,000 had been raised by fans on the platform which allowed the youngster to sign his first professional contract with 19-time Georgian champions Dinamo Tbilisi.
In February 2024, Croatian side HNK Sibenik snapped him up from Dinamo for €75,000.
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Docea says there's more to come, as the company is looking to partner with more academies, especially in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, to help the talents "not being discovered when they should be discovered", to be seen, and help football fans 'own something.'
"With Nordensa, one problem fixes the other problem. If you get enough fans to invest and own something in football, you can fix the other problem of talents not being discovered - fans helping young athletes get noticed and be rewarded for that," he says, hinting that fans subscribed to the platform might more accurately be described as investors or backers.
Fans who had bought a total of 600 contract shares priced at €30 each, were entitled to a cut of up to eight per cent of Iyendjock's salary for the next five years, as well as other exclusive perks.
Using Advanced Technology To Make Scouting Easier
Even though discovering every possible talented youngster might be a problem on its own, Docea thinks his platform can do the best it can thanks to its modern technology-supported scouting processes.
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"Do traditional scouting in 2024? You can't!" he says, "Look at the talent pool in Nigeria, how are you going to do that physically? The only way to do it is technology."
Florian Bluchel who formerly served as a match analyst at Bayern Munich during the Pep Guardiola era, and then as a scout at Arsenal under Mikel Arteta, before joining Nordensa as its director of football operations, reiterates that the brand is looking where the big European clubs are not.
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"We are looking at sports on the planet where normally, nobody is really scouting. We are looking for players who have the potential to make it to the Big 5 leagues - even if they don't, and end up in Belgium, Poland or wherever - they can get to play professional football, then, my job is done."
"We want to work closely with academies in Africa, in Eastern Europe and smaller countries like Macedonia where normally are also not being scouted," Bluchel added.
Even beyond Iyendjock, Nordensa have gotten more talents such as Mahamud Abdul Karimu to sign for Latvian first-tier club FK Metta, and are currently in the process of securing Nigerian forward Edidiong Ezekiel Enobong a club after having completed a support campaign for the 22-year-old.
"The big thing is that the fans, they create the opportunity. When we upload a player's profile to the app, fans can also see the potential we saw. And when they say to themselves, 'I believe he can make it', this creates an opportunity for the kid," the ex-Arsenal scout said.
So far, Nordensa have entered into scouting partnerships with fifteen clubs including the likes of Standard Liege, Real Zaragoza, and the Japanese champions Kawasaki Frontale, and are looking forward to fifty by the summer of 2024; clubs they can help transfer fan-backed talents to, to kickstart their professional career.
"Everything is real, that's the thing about Nordensa. If you subscribe to support Nordensa, you subscribe to support a real player, not a fantasy player," CEO Docea added.
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