World Football Summit Madrid

History and origin

World Football Summit was founded in Madrid in 2016 by Marian Otamendi, Jan Alessie and their team, who saw that football was changing faster than the structures around it and that the industry lacked a neutral meeting point. What began as a single annual gathering in Madrid grew into a global series spanning multiple regions, while keeping the same founding principle: open, neutral and inclusive. Madrid remains the flagship, and the 2026 edition is the 10th anniversary of the summit, a marker of how the event has tracked the professionalisation of the football business over a decade.

Who attends

WFS Madrid concentrates the decision-making layer of the football industry. The room brings together club and league executives, federations, sponsors and brands, media and rights holders, technology companies and investors. Past stages have featured FIFA President Gianni Infantino, FIFA Referees Committee chairman Pierluigi Collina, US Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone, playing legends such as Ronaldo Nazario and Rio Ferdinand, and outside voices including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. The breadth of the guest list reflects the summit's positioning as a neutral crossroads rather than a single-constituency event.

What it covers

The agenda spans the full football business: digital transformation, data and analytics, fan engagement, media rights, sponsorship, investment and, increasingly, purpose and social impact. For a sport technology vertical the relevant layer is fan engagement, data and platforms, where the data companies, engagement platforms and club digital directors converge. The 2026 anniversary edition introduces new award categories and continues to weave technology and innovation through the core business programme.

Format

The summit runs over two days at La Nave, a former industrial space in Madrid that WFS uses to create open, dynamic networking areas rather than a conventional conference layout. Around the main stage sit two signature properties: the WFS Awards, created in 2017 to recognise the people and projects strengthening the industry, which in a recent edition drew 135 nominations from 20 countries; and the WFS StartCup, a startup competition that recently attracted 81 applications from more than 20 countries, with ten finalists pitching to a packed audience. The combination of conference, awards and startup competition makes the format both senior and forward-looking.

Where it sits in the calendar

WFS Madrid is the European anchor of the WFS circuit, which in 2026 also runs editions in Mexico City in June and Riyadh later in the year. It falls in mid-September, in the dense European autumn run alongside IBC and the SVG Europe Summit, and pairs naturally with the SportsPro Media Summit and SportBiz Europe for an Iberian media and business cluster. In a World Cup year, and on its 10th anniversary, it is the football date that concentrates the most industry attention.

Why it matters for the vertical

WFS Madrid is the European anchor of football's largest business circuit. The value for the vertical is not broadcast engineering but the fan engagement, data and platform layer, where the technology buyers and the startups serving football gather, and the StartCup provides a structured view of emerging companies. For mapping the business and technology of football, it is the reference European event.

The event in numbers (organiser-declared)