Sparta Prague hockey boss Jakub Dlouhý on running Kaprain Sport

Jakub Dlouhý is in charge of marketing, communications and commerce at the hockey club Sparta Prague and at the same time is the “extended arm” of its owner, Karel Pražák. He describes the Kaprain Sport business plainly: the main goal right now is to lose as little as possible.

The sports arm of the Kaprain group was recently spun off into a separate division, Kaprain Sport. It includes the hockey club Sparta, the football club Pardubice, ice hockey arenas and the related sports-marketing agency. Together they are approaching a billion crowns in annual turnover and a million visitors and spectators. But the business can hardly be called profitable: according to Dlouhý, “to put it bluntly, Kaprain Sport’s task right now is to burn as little money as possible.” Sparta’s own budget is around 400 million crowns, and the club usually ends the season with a small loss, which the owner generally covers.

Interest in the club is nonetheless enormous: one in five fans attending Czech Extraliga games goes to the O2 arena to watch Sparta. Yet the club has been waiting almost twenty years for a title, and the current season has started worse than expected, both for Sparta and for the footballers of Pardubice. Dlouhý admits that the pressure on the hockey club will be stronger, and warns: either everyone in the organisation, from the worker operating the ice resurfacer to the players, recognises their obligations to the club and the fans, or changes in the team are inevitable.

Dlouhý speaks about marketing as a practitioner with 25 years of experience. He is behind the agency Concept One, which, after Aleš Valenta’s Olympic gold, built its marketing on the use of athletes’ personal rights and delivered hundreds of sponsorship activations for dozens of brands, some of whose contracts are still running. He has been bound to Karel Pražák by friendship and business since their university days.

His principle is, wherever possible, to free marketing from dependence on results on the ice. In Dlouhý’s view, any activity should achieve its goals regardless of whether the team wins or loses, although the best marketing is still victory and brilliant play. A title, he says, “would help Sparta a lot”.

The backdrop to the conversation is also a conflict within the Extraliga: the clubs are arguing over the sale of marketing and television rights, with Petr Dědek’s Dynamo Pardubice opposing the rest. Dlouhý stresses that Sparta is not trying to catch up with Dynamo at any cost.