Footballco Expands its Football Entertainment Portfolio with the Acquisition of Football Animation Brand 442oons

Footballco has acquired popular animation brand and studio 442oons. With over 8m followers across its social channels, 442oons has racked up more than 4 billion views on YouTube alone.

442oons generates more than 50 million views a month on all platforms and joins Footballco’s portfolio of video-first football brands, which include GOAL’s Front Three and FanZone, YallaGOAL, and 1vs1. Each month, Footballco brands generate more than two billion views across all platforms.

While 442oons will continue to operate as a standalone brand and channel, Footballco will integrate its content across its other brands, such as global football brand GOAL and women’s football brand, INDIVISA. Footballco will also launch new programming from the channel, connecting to more global football fandoms and including women's football.

Footballco also plans to present 442oons to relevant commercial partners as it seeks to grow the brand's revenue outside of traditional programmatic pre-roll. Plans also include the expansion of the brand’s existing merchandise business.

442oons was founded by Dean Stobbart, who joins Footballco in his new role as Head of 442oons and will report to EVP of content and operations, James Lamon.

Lamon said: “What Dean has been able to build with 442oons is remarkable and a testament to his team’s talent and understanding of football culture and humour.

“At Footballco, we cover the game at scale and breadth better than anyone, but with 442oons we saw an opportunity to bring in a brand that offers something new. We were also impressed by the brand’s existing strong following of young fans, especially in the UK and US, who are increasingly seeing YouTube as TV.

Stobbart said: “I created 442oons to celebrate the funny side of a sport which quite often takes itself a bit too seriously. Even though our content has been viewed billions of times, I’m looking forward to seeing the brand grow as part of Footballco and see it mirror the success of their other video-first brands.”

442oons is the second acquisition by Footballco in recent weeks, as earlier this month the company acquired women’s soccer brand and influencer platform SoccerGrlProbs.