Tribuna’s global play – how the sports media outlet is building a platform to “reinvent media”

As traditional media business models falter, publishers are searching for new ways to engage audiences and generate revenue. For the sports media network Tribuna, the answer lies in a major technological and global expansion. Over the past two years, the company has built a new content platform, launched a mobile app, and grown its team to over 200 people worldwide.

Tribuna started in 2010 as the Belarusian site Goals.by and transformed in 2014 into a broader sports media platform with a newly-created Ukrainian sister project. With an addition of the international website later, Tribuna became a network of football websites in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, alongside broader sports media in Belarus and Ukraine. This global push is powered by a significant recent transformation.

The Fix discussed building a sports media outlet for the future with Tribuna’s CEO Maks Berazinski.

A new platform to go global

At the heart of Tribuna’s strategy is a new technology platform, which the company finished building over the last two years. In June, it launched a new app called Football Xtra.

Maks Berazinski tells The Fix that the platform is designed to be a versatile base for future projects. “This constructor can now work in any direction; it can be turned left or right, and then it's just a question of whether there's an advertising market for it and if this media outlet can be profitable”.

In practice, that means the team can launch a fully functional app for any club or league in just 24 hours – without starting from scratch. And while sports are the natural first focus, the same approach can be applied to almost any niche where there’s an audience and a business case.

The platform unifies all of Tribuna's projects, including the international, Ukrainian, and Belarusian sites, onto a single engine. This means a new feature can be developed once and rolled out to all projects simultaneously, saving costs and effort.

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How a global team is managed

Managing this technological project requires significant human resources. Tribuna's product strategy is supported by a large in-house technology team. In a previous interview with Forbes, Berazinski noted that IT specialists make up 25% of the company. This group includes developers, product specialists, QA, and designers.

With a fully remote team of over 200 people working from 28 countries, communication is a challenge. Tribuna’s CEO points to product managers as the essential link between the technical and content worlds. "Their task is to try to connect them, to translate from developer language to editorial language and vice versa," he explains.

Tribuna’s team has grown gradually, rather than through a sudden hiring spree. Its strategy for managing international editorial staff relies on finding strong leaders for each language market.

“We look for such people on whom we can rely, and who can then bring in other cool people,” Berazinski says.

The international editorial division is structured as six distinct language-based subteams, each with its own lead who manages schedules and organisational tasks. These leads are responsible for building their teams by hiring local talent.

The Arabic-speaking world: a new frontier

Tribuna’s global expansion includes a significant focus on the Arabic market, where it has already seen results. According to Berazinski, the strategy is paying off due to a key market dynamic.

“We see that the Arabic version of the site brings us more traffic than even English,” he says. “Simply because the competition in the Arab world for football sites is much lower, and even the product we are currently making is already competitive”.

This expansion comes with challenges. Berazinski notes that AI translators like ChatGPT and DeepL produce poor-quality Arabic, which is unusable for publication. To ensure quality, Tribuna has hired the former editor of Manchester City’s Arabic website and allowed him to build a team of journalists.

Breaking down the wall between journalists and users

A core part of Tribuna’s philosophy is deep user engagement, a feature Berazinski believes is lacking in international media. While many major publishers have removed comment sections, Tribuna puts them at the centre of the experience.

the CEO says. Users can comment, give posts likes or dislikes that affect their visibility, and even write their own blog posts. High-quality user content can be promoted to the main page.

The goal is to become the essential "second-screen" for fans watching a match at home, offering a place to share opinions and connect with a community of fellow supporters.

How to monetise and use AI to save time

With its new platform in place, Tribuna is focusing on converting its audience into paying subscribers. The Football Xtra app includes premium-only features which are unique in the sports media world, such as detailed financial information on player salaries and transfer fees, as an incentive for users to pay. All the classic features, such as match results, news, and comments are available for free.

The company is also looking towards AI to improve its products and efficiency. Berazinski provides an example:

Therefore, Tribuna plans to automate this task with AI.

Another idea is to develop a service for predicting match outcomes based on historical data. As the CEO explains, Tribuna has a database of about 40 years of sports results, as well as all current statistics.

Maks Berazinski believes there is a major untapped market for premium sports content. “Other industries like health and fitness have already proven how big a premium can be. Sports are next – and we’re here to make it happen.”

On the cover: Tribuna leaders Dzmitry Navosha and Maks Berazinski (photo courtesy of Tribuna).