The story behind FAYDER

The true magic of being a fan is feeling like you're part of it. The match-day buzz, the inside knowledge, the moment your athlete crosses a line you've watched them work toward for years — that's the real thing.

But for most fans, that closeness is reserved for whoever owns the box seats. The rest of us watch from a distance and hope the highlight reel catches what we missed.

FAYDER was founded to change that. Real fans aren't just spectators — they're stakeholders. A platform where you find an athlete you believe in, join their inner circle, and get the access, content, and conversation that used to be saved for the people closest to the sport.

Fans don't donate. They join.

FAYDER is a sports platform where fans subscribe directly to elite athletes — Olympic hopefuls, current Olympians, tour pros, national-level competitors — and become part of their team.

Pick an athlete. Choose a tier. From that moment, you're inside the circle.

You get:

• Exclusive content — image, video, blog, and audio you won't see anywhere else
• A group chat with the athlete and the other supporters in their team
• Livestreams where you can ask them anything
• Invitations to events and behind-the-scenes camp access, depending on your tier
• Athlete-signed merch and perks

The athlete sets their own tiers, runs their own community, and keeps 90% of every subscription. We take 10% to keep the platform running. That's it.

This isn't charity. It isn't sponsorship. It's belief, backed by action.

Most elite sport runs on a system that doesn't reward talent and hard work alone. Sponsorships chase visibility. Federation funding lags inflation. Family money runs out. The funding gap doesn't close once an athlete makes a national team or an Olympic squad — it runs the whole length of an elite career. Olympic hopefuls train full-time on minimal income. Olympic medallists in most sports earn less than mid-career professionals in other fields. The athletes who keep going are often the ones who happened to have the right network, not the ones who happened to have the most potential.

FAYDER fixes the bit no one else has tried to fix: the relationship between the people who care about an athlete's journey and the journey itself.

When fans become stakeholders, the funding stops being an annual lottery. It becomes a recurring base. Athletes get the time and the resources to focus on the next session, the next race, the next start line — instead of the next sponsorship pitch.

We're not asking fans to subsidise the system. We're giving them a way in.

FAYDER is for elite athletes across the full ladder — Olympic hopefuls, current Olympians, tour pros, established internationals, national-level competitors on the rise. Anyone competing at the elite level and carrying the funding gap with them. The kind of athlete whose story you'd want to follow, whether they're chasing a first cap or defending a title.

Today, ten of them are live on the platform — across golf, rowing, athletics, swimming, and shooting. Each one has a fan team forming around them in real time.

We're early. The first few hundred fans on FAYDER are shaping what the platform becomes. If you're here now, you're not joining a finished product — you're joining a movement that's still being built by the people in it.

I started FAYDER after watching one too many talented athletes walk away from sports they loved because the funding maths didn't work — and one too many sports fans tell me they wished they could do more than watch.

The two halves clicked. If fans could become stakeholders in an athlete's journey, both sides would get something they couldn't get anywhere else: the athlete gets a sustainable base; the fan gets a real stake in something they were already invested in.

We're building the platform we wished existed. Thanks for being part of it.

— Ben Toland, Founder

FAYDER is built and run from the UK by a small team — Ben Toland (Founder & CEO), Keri Smyth (COO), and Andy Gunn (Fractional CTO).

We take the platform seriously: payments run through Stripe, accounts through Clerk, content moderated against a published standard. Our Community Code sets out how supporters and athletes treat each other on FAYDER, and how we act when that standard isn't met. Our Privacy Policy and Terms cover the rest.

Questions, feedback, or want to talk? team@fayder.app