Founder Von Cranach quits struggling fansite OneFootball

Lucas von Cranach, the founder and CEO of Germany-based football fan site and streamer OneFootball has resigned, some four months after the outfit announced a restructuring and swathe of redundancies.

Von Cranach is to be replaced by Patrick Fischer, the company’s co-CEO and former chief business officer.

OneFootball, whose shareholders include top international clubs Manchester City, Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Juventus, passed the milestone of 170 million monthly active users for its site in May, according to Von Cranach, who signed off on his LinkedIn feed.

“Only a founder can understand the mixture of overwhelming feelings and emotions I have right now. You seed a plant; you care and foster it and you get to the point where the seed becomes a tree and it can stand by itself. There is the sadness to leave this great team and partners behind but there is also a big trust in the team to lead the path forward with great success,” he said.

Chief financial officer Jörg Meiner and chief product officer Ismail Elshareef have also reportedly both left the company.

Von Cranach’s exit follows a difficult period for the company. In February, Von Cranach announced that OneFootball needed to cut its headcount from 470 to 320 to cut costs.

Also in February, OneFootball struck a partnership agreement with sports streamer DAZN that saw DAZN stream live football matches from elite leagues available as a pay-per-view offering to OneFootball users.

Centred on Germany and Austria, the deal was designed to allow OneFootball users access on a flexible basis to fixtures from Italy’s Serie A, and France’s Ligue 1. The partners said that rights to further international competitions would be added to the partnership in the near future.

Last year OneFootball raised US$300 million in a funding round with an apparent ambition to challenge the status quo in German sports broadcasting.