Livesport CEO Pavel Krbec aims for 300 million app users

The Flashscore app, developed by the Czech company Livesport, is used by more than 150 million people worldwide every month. For the company's chief executive, Pavel Krbec, however, that figure isn't something to be proud of — just an interim result on the way to a far more ambitious goal.

“It's part of Livesport's culture that we're never satisfied. 150 million isn't much, we need to quickly get to 300 million. I'm not happy with this result,” Krbec said, without a trace of a smile, at the Forbes Business Fest.

Although the platform remains, and will remain, multi-sport, Krbec sees the main growth potential in a single sport — football. “We're convinced the path runs through football. Today it rules everything,” the company's chief explained. According to him, that means the business is consciously writing off a huge share of the world's population: “We've automatically switched off more than two billion people, because nobody in India cares about football. We don't operate in China, because running an online business there is too complicated, and we don't want to get involved in that.”

Even so, Krbec believes there's still plenty of room to grow: the remaining audience is still obsessed with football. He names speed and data accuracy as the company's key values: “We simply can't disappoint fans by announcing a fake goal or the wrong score in the third tier of Brazilian football.”

Today, results alone aren't enough — Livesport, which broadcasts in more than 50 languages, has turned into a genuine multimedia operation, as the company's global content director, Alan Záruba, put it. The company works with media groups such as Disney, CNN Brasil, Canal+ and the Czech CME, as well as with sports brands like the NHL and NBA. Together with former national-team goalkeeper Petr Čech, it has launched a documentary series, and with the Czech startup ValkaAI it's developing an AI avatar able to chat with users in real time in dozens of languages.

Yet the company itself doesn't earn directly from the millions of users checking match results every day. “Our business model is simple — it's B2B. We don't make money from user subscriptions and we're not planning to,” Krbec said. Livesport's real clients are bookmakers around the world, along with financial platforms such as eToro and Revolut, whose users, according to the CEO, tend to be risk-inclined to begin with. The company firmly rejects introducing a paywall, something used by many media outlets and sports platforms — in Krbec's view, that would blur the business's focus.

The company, based in Prague's Butovice district, is betting not just on organic growth but on acquisitions too — the biggest so far being the purchase of Spain's BeSoccer. “That was a real test for us: a Prague firm suddenly found itself owning a company in Málaga, and we had to learn to live, as Czechs, with a different culture,” he recalls, adding that the expansion will continue.

Krbec himself joined Livesport as an outside manager — stepping into a company with its own history and an established team — and admits it wasn't easy. “But if you want to be the CEO of a company like Livesport, you can't just sit on the couch and talk. You have to really grind to push the company forward,” he says. He sees the company's biggest advantage as the speed of its decision-making: “Livesport is one of the few Czech companies where we make our own decisions, and we do it fast, without being tied to a corporate structure run from abroad.” Right now, what occupies him most is how to transform Livesport for the age of artificial intelligence.