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Pro Football Academy

Off a decade-old platform, onto 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

Running the entire business on a platform that had stopped scaling

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 into a broader media business. The whole operation ran on a custom platform built and maintained in-house over more than ten years, a system that could no longer scale and had become the business’s biggest operational risk. We are moving PFA off that platform and onto HubSpot in phases.

PFA 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 delivers over a thousand trainings a day and is expanding 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 entire operation ran on a single bespoke system, everything the company did was concentrated in one aging platform. For a business growing this fast, that concentration was a structural risk, and the system had run out of room. PFA needed more than a new tool. They needed a hands-on partner who could communicate and execute quickly, and de-risk the technology so the business was ready to scale.

A phased migration, with HubSpot at the center

We started on site, not behind a screen. We flew to PFA and whiteboarded the customer communication flows together, mapping how the business 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 there we designed a phased migration to avoid a risky big-bang switch on a business running a thousand trainings a day. The first phase, now live, moved everything the team works in day to day onto HubSpot:

  • All customer communications across channels
  • Task and activity management
  • Reporting and dashboards
  • Customer support
  • The integrations that tie it all together

We bridged in specialist systems so PFA gained capabilities the old platform lacked, all connected through HubSpot:

  • Sinch for SMS and RCS messaging, with two-way conversations routing into HubSpot and SMS fallback for reliable delivery
  • Aircall for calling, integrated directly into the workspace
  • PFA’s own academy app, an in-house build that uses HubSpot as its database, giving members a live view of their training activity and writing new activity back to HubSpot in two-way sync

The final phase, now underway, migrates the data into HubSpot and switches the legacy platform off, leaving HubSpot as the single system of record and removing the structural risk at the heart of the challenge.

From spreadsheets to a real-time view of the business

Before, PFA had no way to run marketing campaigns and almost no visibility into their own data. To work out who to call, who to follow up with, and which customers were at risk, the team exported CSV files and cross-checked spreadsheets by hand. It took a lot of time, and customers still slipped through unnoticed. With operations now running on HubSpot:

  • They create and send marketing campaigns natively, something the legacy platform could never do, using HubSpot’s Breeze AI to draft landing page and email copy
  • Live reporting and dashboards have replaced the spreadsheet cross-checking, giving a clear, real-time view of customer health for the first time
  • Follow-up and at-risk outreach now runs as an automated, task-based system driven by HubSpot data, so the right people are contacted at the right time
  • Email, SMS, and RCS are consolidated in one place

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

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Pro Football Academy

The impact: a platform that keeps compounding

PFA now runs its day-to-day operations on HubSpot at the scale they have grown into, over a thousand trainings a day across the UK and new regions, on a platform built for that volume. The business is no longer run end to end on a single bespoke system, and PFA’s own developer is free to build on top of HubSpot rather than maintain an aging platform alone.

Consolidating onto HubSpot also gives PFA the clean, unified foundation that makes AI usable. With every conversation in a single inbox across email, SMS, and RCS, they are set up to layer AI into how they handle a high volume of messages as they scale.