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: since 2016 WFS has run more than 30 international events and welcomed close to 40,000 participants, per the organiser's own decade retrospective. Through that growth it kept the same founding principle, open, neutral and inclusive, and Madrid stayed the flagship. 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. The 2026 speaker list already carries names spanning governance, clubs and commercial football: LALIGA president Javier Tebas, Spanish football federation (RFEF) president Rafael Louzán, Norwegian FA president Lise Klaveness, UEFA women's football director Nadine Kessler, US Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone, Atalanta B.C. co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca, Juventus and Italy legend Giorgio Chiellini, and Real Valladolid chairman Ronaldo Nazário. Past stages have also featured FIFA president Gianni Infantino, referee Pierluigi Collina, and outside voices such as 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 2026 agenda is structured around six thematic areas, as published on the official programme: Governance, Ownership and Leadership; Investment and Commercial Growth; Innovation, Technology and Data; Media, Content and Fan Engagement; Performance, Science and Talent Development; and Culture, Purpose and Impact. For a sport technology vertical the relevant layer is Innovation, Technology and Data together with Media, Content and Fan Engagement, where the data companies, engagement platforms and club digital directors converge. Recent editions have also given weight to purpose and social impact, with Common Goal serving as WFS's official purpose partner. The 10th anniversary edition introduces new award categories, including a Best Content Creator award presented by TikTok, and continues to weave technology and innovation through the core business programme.

Format

The summit runs over two days at La Nave (C. Cifuentes 5, Villaverde, 28021 Madrid), a former industrial space 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, recognise the people and projects strengthening the industry; the 2025 edition drew 135 nominations from 20 countries, and the 2026 programme runs 11 competitive categories plus two special recognitions, each attached to a named partner (Deloitte, FIFPRO, UN Tourism, Women in Football and others). The WFS StartCup, the industry's reference startup competition, has taken more than 500 applications across six editions since 2017, with its most recent round drawing 130+ applications from over 30 countries; finalists pitch live to investors and decision-makers in Madrid. 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 WFS Mexico City on 3-4 June, a week before the FIFA World Cup opens, and WFS Riyadh later in the year on dates still to be confirmed. In 2026 it moves to a mid-September slot (15-16 September), earlier than the 2025 Madrid edition, which ran on 15-16 October. That places it in the dense European autumn run alongside IBC and the broadcast events on the sport tech circuit, and it pairs naturally with 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. The StartCup, run in 2026 in collaboration with EBAN Sports, provides a structured view of emerging companies, with a jury drawn from Accenture, Athlete Ventures, GSIC powered by Microsoft and Flying Finn Angels. For mapping the business and technology of football, and for anyone comparing the sport tech circuit against finance-led fixtures such as the FT Business of Football Summit, it is the reference European event.

Press interest and media coverage

Coverage of the Madrid edition clusters around three angles, based on the confirmed examples below.

• Purpose and social impact: Bonito, a football-for-good publication, covered the 2025 edition under a "where football meets purpose" frame, reporting on Common Goal's role as WFS's official purpose partner and on sessions led by Lise Klaveness, Nadine Kessler and Grace Ahrens on gender equality, inclusion and sustainability.
• Programme and speaker line-up: Bonito also published a full speakers-and-sessions rundown of the 2025 edition, documenting club, league, federation and brand representation including Fernando Carro (Bayer 04 Leverkusen) and Chris Davis (New Balance).
• Industry-trends synthesis: WFS's own resources hub aggregated more than 120 hours of talks across its 2025 events into a published "football industry priorities" analysis, reporting that stadium infrastructure was the single most-discussed topic across the year's editions.

Media accreditation is handled through an application-based Media Pass; the organiser does not publicly disclose accredited journalist counts as of this verification.

The event in numbers (organiser-declared)