Built by someone who was in the photographs.
Octafield Club is made by a former professional number eight who spent fifteen years carrying sponsor logos across a pitch, and then went looking for who was counting them.
The short version
My name is Renaldo Bothma. I played professional rugby for fifteen years — more than a hundred senior appearances for the Bulls, the Sharks, the Pumas and Harlequins, and for Namibia, whom I captained. I now build software for the clubs I used to play for.
Why this exists
For fifteen years I ran out wearing sponsors on my chest, past boards carrying more of them, into photographs that went out to tens of thousands of people. Nobody, at any club I played for, could tell those sponsors what they got.
Not because anyone was careless. The commercial staff at a provincial union are two or three people running a season on a spreadsheet. The tools that do this properly are sold to federations and top-tier franchises at prices a provincial union will never see, and the agencies that produce sponsorship valuations are usually commissioned by the league or the sponsor — not by the club.
So the club sits in the middle of a commercial relationship it cannot measure, selling inventory it cannot price, and going into renewal meetings with a PDF of screenshots.
That gap is the whole company. Not fan engagement, not another content management system. The specific, unglamorous problem of proving what a partner received, at a club that cannot afford Nielsen.
What I actually know, and what I don't
I know what it looks like from the inside of a squad. I know how a matchday actually runs, why the digital person at a club has no time on a Saturday, what a team announcement does to engagement, and why players will film content for you if you ask properly and will not if you ask badly.
I know the commercial side from the other end — being the asset rather than selling it.
What I am not is a media agency. I do not measure broadcast exposure and I do not pretend to. That runs on national audience panels and frame-by-frame analysis, and firms like Nielsen Sports and Futures Sport do it properly. Our numbers sit alongside theirs. Where a claim on this site is an estimate rather than something we counted, we say so.
How Octafield Club is built
Octafield began as a multi-sport data platform — fixtures, results, squads and player histories across South African rugby, cricket and football, going back two decades. That archive is why a club's site is populated on the day it launches rather than filled in over a season.
Octafield Club is the product built on top of it: the website, the fan app and the commercial console, with sponsor detection running across everything a club publishes.
It is deliberately narrow. We do not do ticketing, we integrate with it. We do not do broadcast measurement. We do not build fantasy games or augmented reality, because at this level they go unused. The things we do own — detection, inventory, supporter data and the match centre — are the ones that are genuinely hard and genuinely missing.
Who we build for
Provincial unions, cricket franchises, semi-professional clubs and community clubs with real sponsors. The tier that is too big for free tools and too small for the enterprise vendors to return a call.
In practice that means the Currie Cup and its equivalents, CSA franchise cricket, the Polish Ekstraliga, English Championship and National League clubs, Australian state league rugby and premier cricket.
How we work
Before anything is signed, we will take a season of your social accounts and a partner list and come back with what those partners actually received — counted, measured and labelled separately. That costs you nothing and you keep the report either way.
If the number is worth having, we go on. If it is not, at least you now know.
Contact
WhatsApp +27 83 579 6504 or email hello@octafieldclub.com. You will be speaking to me, not a sales team.
Common questions
Who is behind Octafield Club?
Octafield Club is built by Renaldo Bothma, a former professional rugby player with over 100 senior caps for the Bulls, Sharks, Pumas, Harlequins and Namibia, whom he captained. He now builds sports technology through Octafield in Johannesburg.
Why does a former player build sponsorship software?
Because the problem is visible from inside the game. Clubs carry sponsor marks across kit, boards and content every week and almost none can tell a partner what they received. That gap is obvious to someone who has stood in the photographs.
Where is Octafield Club based?
Johannesburg, South Africa. We work with clubs in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia.
Send us one season. We’ll show you what it was worth.
Give us your social accounts and a partner list. We come back with the exposure those partners already received, measured, before anything is signed. No cost, no commitment.