FootballHero is a game that wants to turn you into a soccer betting prophet

There’s been nothing like FootballHero out there on the mobile app stores. I find this surprising, considering that soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and the football betting market is worth billions.

While FootballHero is not a gambling app involving real money, it is a game where you can make match predictions with virtual credits, climb the global rankings by demonstrating sage-like abilities, and become an expert with your own fan following hanging on to your every prediction.

You can challenge your friends by creating competitions, and redeem the credits you earn from correct predictions for prizes and merchandises. Players can predict matches for any league game in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, or Italy.

One real reward of this app, however, is obvious. If you’re a soccer betting fanatic, following the right experts can even the odds when you’re putting actual money on your favorite team.

Upcoming app features include “following the top predictors within each league with the best record, as well as working with companies to project FootballHero on a second screen during matches for an even more engaging and action-packed football-watching experience,” says Dinesh Bhatia, CEO and founder of My Manisku, the Singapore company behind the app.

The mechanics for both FootballHero and the earlier TradeHero app are the same, despite trading stocks and predicting match scores being a world apart. Both are made by the same startup. These apps, along with brain training game Brain Wars, also make full use of the competitive social element to increase stickiness.

Sure, playing against a computer is fun, but nothing beats trash talking your friends and matching blow-for-blow against live opponents. Climbing a global leaderboard gives a tangible sense of progress, and that element has been incorporated into many mobile games.

FootballHero has been in the pipeline for the company since the beginning, and this is just the start of a franchise. TradeHero has about a million downloads and 750,000 monthly active users, but FootballHero has a chance to be just as big – if not bigger. The app launched not long ago, so it’s too early to tell how well it will do.

Investors are betting heavily on the company though. It raised a series A round of US$10 million from heavyweight venture capital firms KPCB and IPV Capital in September 2013, following a US$600,000 investment from TNF Ventures. At that time, it had about 280,000 registered users, of which 210,000 used the app bi-monthly.

Following that round, it pushed into China, launching a localized TradeHero app for the domestic market. TradeHero is earning money from taking a cut of the fees paid by users to subscribe to the stock tips of top traders. It’s also earning from lead generation to financial service providers.

“We will see different kinds of trading being included on TradeHero, such as foreign exchanges and currencies very soon. We are also enhancing TradeHero’s gamification aspects, as well as developing fun, bite-sized trading-related educational content on the app,” adds Bhatia.

See more: Baidu claims its data is more accurate than Microsoft, Paul the Octopus, at World Cup predictions