Alumni Alex Zusammen told us about his time studying the MBA in Sports Management at Real Madrid Graduate School in 2014-2015, and how this experience changed his way of looking at life and his future career. Seven years later, after working for big companies in the sports world, he is taking on his most ambitious project: Impulsyn, the social network for the sports industry.
“I played football for several years and wanted to do the master’s degree at the School. I was very interested in the world of sport and had been involved in the sports side of things: coaching, sports management, etc. I had just spent three years in Germany and I wanted to improve my English, network and make the leap to the corporate side of this industry through the MBA in Sports Management”.
“During the master’s degree I discovered my knack for entrepreneurship, that I was also capable of creating different things and play a leading role, not just be a spectator. I had contact with professors who are not just academics, they are professionals working in the industry and beyond the knowledge you can find in a book, you get experiences that inspire you and make you change the way you see things. There I started working on my first projects”.
As a student at the School, Alex Zusammen started a school football cup, a small initiative that grew into an event with sponsors and prizes that reached a thousand participants before the pandemic. He also co-founded the ‘Get Together’ with his colleague Felipe Mora, a tournament held at Real Madrid City between students of Real Madrid Graduate School–Universidad Europea which encourages interaction between the students of the master’s degree, creating a great networking and educational environment for students who have the same goal: to make it in the sports industry.
“I was later able to work with Real Madrid, where I learned a lot and had my first contact with the industry from another perspective. I found a world with lots of growth and I returned to pack my bags to go to Germany for a contract with PUMA. It was an intense experience full of professional challenges that made me take the final step towards taking on the next project”.
“Impulsyn is a social network that we’ve launched for the sports industry. We want to give people in this industry the tool they need to further professionalise the industry based on three pillars: networking, employment and training. On this basis, we will seek to continue to evolve as needed, and we already have some changes in place”.
“The academic and professional side of sports is growing, now with specific postgraduate programmes, which will continue to evolve towards undergraduate programmes. There’ll be lots more people wanting to enter this industry, so it’s necessary to have a platform to streamline relations, development, networking, employment, etc.”.
“Having a portal where you can develop your sporting career is something professionals and students have been asking for. There are so many people looking for a job related to the world of sports, but what we want with Impulsyn is that even if people in the industry are not looking for jobs, they are on the network. In other words, we don’t want them to use it just to look for a job, but to use our network because it helps them in lots of other ways. With Impulsyn we have sought to include what other platforms offer and adapt this to the needs of sport, with a more visual feed and a concept of professionalisation.