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Pro Football Academy

Accelerating sales and marketing excellence with HubSpot

June 2026

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Phased platform migration
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HubSpot onboarding and build
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Sinch, Aircall and app integrations

A sales and marketing platform that could no longer scale

Sports training & education · United Kingdom, expanding into Spain, the UAE and the United States

Pro Football Academy is on track to become the UK’s largest sports-training company, scaling fast across new regions and evolving from a football-training business towards a broader media business over the next two to three years. Its sales and marketing operation ran on a custom platform built and maintained in-house over more than ten years, a system that could not scale and had become the business’s biggest operational risk. HubSpot now runs the company’s sales and marketing operations.

Pro Football Academy started small, running a modest number of trainings across the UK, and the custom platform built for them worked well at that size. But the business has scaled rapidly: it now trains over 13,000 players a week worldwide and has expanded into Spain, the UAE and the United States, and the decade-old system was never built for that scale or for those markets.

Because the sales and marketing operation ran on a single bespoke system, everything the company did was concentrated in one aging platform that was never designed for this volume or for multiple regions. For a business growing this fast, that concentration was a risk, and replacing it with a scalable sales and marketing platform was essential to the company’s next phase.

Day to day, the team had almost no visibility into their own data. To work out who to call, who to follow up with and which customers were at risk, they exported CSV files and manually cross-checked spreadsheets, and even then customers slipped through unnoticed.

PFA needed more than a new tool. They needed a hands-on partner who could communicate and execute quickly, and who could de-risk the technology to make the business ready to scale.

A phased migration, with HubSpot at the center

We started on site, not behind a screen. We flew to PFA HQ and whiteboarded the customer communication flows together, mapping how the sales and marketing operation should run once off the legacy platform. Working through it in person earned the trust to replace a system they had relied on for a decade, and surfaced detail a remote audit would miss.

From that discovery we designed a phased migration to avoid a risky big-bang switch on a business training over 13,000 players a week, with HubSpot at the center and best-of-breed app partners handling the channels the old platform could not, each integrated into HubSpot rather than built as fragile one-off code.

The replatform of sales and marketing operations to HubSpot is now complete. In HubSpot they now have:

All customer communicationsTask & activity managementReporting & dashboardsCustomer supportConnected integrations

We bridged in specialist systems so Pro Football Academy gained capabilities the old platform lacked, while keeping everything connected through HubSpot:

SinchSMS and RCS messaging, with two-way conversations routing into HubSpot and SMS fallback for reliable delivery.
AircallCalling, integrated directly into the HubSpot workspace.
PFA academy appConnected to HubSpot through the API, with a caching design that stays comfortably within HubSpot’s daily API limits.

From spreadsheets to a real-time view of the business

Before, the team had no way to run marketing campaigns at all. With sales and marketing now running on HubSpot, the day to day changed completely:

Marketing campaigns, nativelySomething the legacy platform could never do, with HubSpot’s Breeze AI drafting the copy for landing pages and emails.
Real-time customer healthLive reporting and dashboards replaced the spreadsheet cross-checking, giving the team a clear view for the first time.
Automated follow-upAt-risk outreach runs as a task-based system driven by HubSpot data, so the right people are reached at the right time.
One inbox, every channelEmail, SMS and RCS conversations consolidated in a single place.

Together this freed up a lot of the team’s time and significantly reduced the risk of customers falling through the cracks.

“Introducing HubSpot to our sales and marketing team has been transformational. It has given them greater visibility across the whole customer journey and allowed us to tailor communications more effectively.”David Ancell, CMO, Pro Football Academy
Pro Football Academy

The impact: a platform that keeps compounding

The migration is already changing what the business is capable of. Pro Football Academy now runs its sales and marketing day-to-day operations on HubSpot at the scale they have grown into, training over 13,000 players a week worldwide, on a platform built for that volume. The sales and marketing core now lives on HubSpot and supported app partners, and PFA’s own developer is free to build on top of that platform, including their academy app. That has already made the business far more robust and easier to run and scale as the team grows, and it removes its biggest structural risk.

Consolidating onto HubSpot also gives Pro Football Academy the clean, unified foundation that makes AI usable, which the fragmented legacy system could never support. With every conversation now in a single inbox across email, SMS, RCS and other channels, they are set up to layer AI into how they handle a high volume of messages as they scale, turning the migration into a platform that keeps compounding in value.