FanWide, a startup dedicated to building sports fans communities, added former Adidas VP and general manager, Lawrence Norman, as an advisor to help with business development and team strategy.
Since launching in 2016, Seattle-based FanWide has promoted over 1.2 million fan club events for 14,000 chapters nationwide. FanWide runs the world’s largest fan club database for teams in the NFL, NCAA Football, NBA, WNBA, NCAA Basketball, MLB, NHL, soccer, rugby, racing and dozens of other leagues.
With 21 years at Adidas, Norman was at the head of many of Adidas’ branding efforts as the GM of global basketball, VP of business and brand affairs and the GM for Southeast Europe for both Adidas Reebok, where he had oversight responsibility of a 400-person team that covered Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, FYROM and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Norman also played four years of professional basketball in Israel and advises a few other tech startups such as, Storr (https://www.storr.co) and GameOn (https://gameontechnology.com).
“Having lived overseas for many years, I was always looking for places to support my hometown (Boston) teams. FanWide has developed a scalable tech platform which offers sports teams and brands with unique ways to engage their remote fans. FanWide has the potential to change how millions of fans consume their sports no matter where they are in the world,” said Norman.
FanWide connects sports fans living in or traveling to any city through in-person meetups organized by local fan club chapters. FanWide.com helps fan club leaders and alumni associations discover other local fans, promote their games, run contests, collect donations and measure attendance. The company also helps sports teams and leagues develops new communities and get their games featured on TVs across its network of over 10,000 local sports bars.
“We are excited to bring Lawrence onto our advisory board. As a former sports business executive who helped Adidas become a worldwide brand, his guidance will be invaluable to us as we create new partnerships with professional teams and sports sponsors,” said Symon Perriman, CEO and Founder of FanWide.
