Site: Fanroom

by Matt on 09 November 2011

http://fanroom.co.uk

Where will you watch the match? Find your ultimate venue to enjoy sport-watching.

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From the podcast

Pros

Capacity crowd

A site that lists all the pubs, bars and other venues that play sport isn’t exactly ground-breaking. But it’s surprising how poorly it has been done up until now.

When I sat down with an old friend and decided to tackle this problem, we wanted to have a site that would tell you what games were showing in any given pub but we pretty quickly realised this kind of information would be a) really hard to get and b) pretty unreliable.

So instead we set about just chronicling every venue in London showing sport and which channels they have and open it up to ‘the community’ so it’s kind of a Sports Bars Wiki. Getting reviews and ratings from users made much more sense than the model used by most competitors: bars paying to be on there. This way we’re hoping to build a ‘Trip Advisor for sports pubs’.

Fanroom is where we’re at and we’re already the biggest listings site for sports bars in the UK with 500 venues. We’ve got a top ten that we’re very happy with and actually represents some genuinely nice places to watch sport - unlike many of the dives that come to mind for a lot of people.

There’s lots more info about our thinking over on the Fanroom blog but if you need to find somewhere playing the match, we’re the best option in town.

Cons

Behind closed doors

So the main flaw is it’s only sports bars in London at the moment but we’re aiming to roll out to more UK cities as soon as we can (and have conquered the capital).

We don’t actually have forthcoming sports fixtures on there yet, which would certainly be a nice complementary feature. We’ve had to accept that we can’t tell people what games will be on where because we can’t account for the whims of bar staff…

Some extra features like info about the team bias of a venue could be useful too and something we could surface from the reviews.

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