TL;DR

Footballco says its Goal-e assistant helped lift Goal’s World Cup audience 42% above the 2022 tournament, across a group total exceeding 1.1 billion page views. The same publisher booked a £9.1m loss for 2025. Both belong in the same story.

What the assistant does

Goal-e draws on two decades of the title’s archive and handles suggested questions, interactive answers, team summaries, illustrations and — the function behind these figures — translation. Anything it touches carries a label marking it as generated, assisted, translated or altered. Chief technology officer Nigel Leigh offered the sharpest example: a World Cup final piece filed by a Dutch reporter at Voetbalzone, put into Japanese, took 803,000 page views on its own.

The numbers

Group-wide, 114 million users produced upwards of 1.1 billion page views over the tournament, with the user count 22% ahead of Qatar. Goal alone reached 77 million users and 439 million page views, the latter up 55%. Arabic-language Kooora drew an outsized 494 million views from 26 million users, and Comscore data put the portfolio ahead of ESPNFC and The Athletic among American users.

Turnover reached £55m last year on 13% growth, with the mix shifting underneath it. Display and programmatic slid 12% to £18.2m; branded content climbed 39% to £26.2m, passing advertising for the first time; affiliate work rose 21% to £10.2m and is running 23% higher again in the current half. Automation is doing that job. Footballco says it now generates ten times the affiliate content it could before, with previews and line-up pieces largely produced without a journalist.

Looking forward

The signal for UK publishers is where the growth came from, not that it happened. Search climbed as a share of traffic during the tournament, from 58% to 65%, while organic social collapsed from 8% to 1%. That is less a victory over AI Overviews than a publisher rebuilding around search after Facebook walked away from links in 2023, in markets where Google’s summaries arrived later than they did here. The caveat sits in the accounts: losses every year, £9.1m of them last year, which the company attributes to writing down intellectual property and funding its American expansion. Cheaper content and a bigger audience have both arrived. Profit has not, and that is the question any UK newsroom weighing the same tooling actually needs answered.