Waasland-Beveren: digital financial performance tracking with EMASPHERE

Waasland-Beveren is a Belgian football club founded in May 2010. Two years after Waasland and Beveren merged, the Lions won the final. It was a turning point for the team, which has stayed in the top flight of Belgian football ever since. The club was recently taken over by Bolt Football Holdings, a company led by experienced American sports investors David Blitzer, Jahm Najafi and Jeff Moorad. New prospects are now opening up for Waasland-Beveren.

The merged team’s mission is to keep its supporters happy, in other words, to finish the season in the top flight. Brandon, Waasland-Beveren’s finance director, explains his goal of building a club that is stable over the long term, together with the American shareholders. The future of the young players in the organization is also one of his top priorities.

Since CEO Antoine Gobin arrived, the club has structured its management by digitalizing processes across its departments. He is doing everything he can to help each employee work more efficiently and focus on their core tasks.

“Before EMASPHERE, the organization didn’t yet have state-of-the-art tools. The accountants were working with dozens of Excel files at the same time,” says Brandon, who wanted to improve the way things worked.

In choosing EMASPHERE as the club’s performance management solution, the finance director also had Waasland-Beveren’s American shareholders in mind, as they wanted a clear, fast overview of the club’s financial data.

“Reports used to be produced as and when they were needed. Now they are far more thought through, detailed and frequent,” says Brandon.

Waasland-Beveren also has to provide a lot of financial data to the Pro League, especially for licensing.

“These financial documents have a specific format that we can now build into our reports. All we have to do is paste them into the Pro League tool. That’s real efficiency!”