The case

The club before

Velilla de San Antonio sits twenty minutes east of Madrid: twelve thousand people, one main street, a municipal pitch with a green fence round it. C.D. Ribera plays there, nine teams and about two hundred players, from the smallest children up to a men's side in the regional league. The town is real. The club is invented.

Ángel has been president for nine years and sells cleaning supplies to Madrid offices during the week. The club happens in his evenings, which is how it happens at this level.

The kit order is Marisol's and has been for six years. In June she asks the parents' group for sizes and half of them answer. She chases the rest at the pitch, collects the money over five weeks, sends one list, and in September receives eleven boxes stacked by size. Two Saturdays go on putting the right shirt into the right child's hands. Then October arrives with the boy who has grown, the girl who signed up in week three, and the families who want a different size from the one they gave her, and it is the same work again in a smaller shape.

The website is a page somebody's cousin built: a low-resolution badge, a phone number, a fixture list two seasons old. Registration happens over WhatsApp. The Instagram account has around four hundred followers and posts when somebody remembers. The sponsor is the driving school on the main street, whose name goes across two hundred shirts and is seen on Saturday mornings by the parents who already know where it is. Nobody has asked it for more, and it has never offered.

None of this is bad management. Ángel and Marisol are good at what they do and the club has not missed a season in thirty years. It is an ordinary amateur club carrying a load that is more fragmented than anyone outside it would guess: the kit, the money, the sizes, the replacements, the sign-ups, the fixtures, the photographs, the sponsor, each one living somewhere different and all of them landing on two or three people with jobs.

Nobody who is not a registered player buys anything from Ribera, because there is nothing to buy. And the club is proud. A framed photograph hangs in the bar from the year it went up and Ángel can name everyone in it. Perhaps three hundred people in Velilla know the club's colours, and most of them have a child in it.

The market as it was, and EKANA inside it

Ángel had changed supplier twice, and the conversation was the same both times: three companies sent a price, a drawing and a delivery date. A big brand through a distributor, expensive and known and not much interested in changing a design. The sports shop in the next town, which already ran an online shop his parents could order from. A custom outfit that would draw whatever he asked and undercut the brand.

EKANA was the fourth call, drawing whatever the club asked for like the custom outfits did and costing less than they did. That was its whole position: the same offer as the people it most resembled, for less money. Club shops, online ordering, free replacement of a torn shirt, a design of your own, none of it new in Madrid and none of it EKANA's invention. Being the cheap version of your nearest rivals is where a price war starts, and EKANA had already lost a club to one.

What EKANA saw

The question EKANA had been asking was how to sell Ángel a better shirt. There was no better shirt to sell him. Four suppliers would have answered the phone by Friday and three of them could draw.

What the club was short of was everything around the shirt. To anyone not already inside it, Ribera looked like very little. A new family judged it on a page built by somebody's cousin. A business that helped got a logo on a chest and nothing to say about it afterwards. The people who might have cared had never once been offered a way to.

None of that was something Ángel had weighed up and turned down. A page worth sending to a new family, a range to wear off the pitch, something the town could buy: he had never asked what any of them cost, because at this level clubs rarely ask and suppliers rarely offer. They sat where a floodlit pitch sits: a thing clubs with money have.

So EKANA changed the question. Not how do we sell this club better kit, but how do we make a small club worth following, wearing, identifying with and standing behind.