Rafael Molina Harno thought he could create what Mercury13 needed in-house.
The commercial marketing manager for the women’s soccer ownership group required a better sponsorship tool. Mercury13’s three clubs — FC Badalona Women, Bristol City Women FC and FC Como Women — handle their local and regional deals on their own. Mercury13 assists when needed and also negotiates group deals (like its recently announced connection to Catapult). While Harno explained this to me, I imagined a Venn diagram that quickly began looking like a Celtic knot.
So in the age of AI tools aplenty, Harno started working. “Being a little cocky, I looked at what was on the market, and I was like, ‘I can build that myself,’” Harno said. “... I spent two weeks building it out. I soon hit a couple of walls. So I started taking calls with the different techs out there, and I thought, ‘I’m going to steal their ideas and development plans.’ Sorry, Hannah, that was my initial intention.”
Hannah is Hannah Sorkin, the CEO and co-founder of PlayMaker Software, who chuckled along on the call with us. After Harno and Sorkin initially connected, their conversations eventually led Harno to the realization that PlayMaker was the tool Mercury13 needed. The two companies officially announced their multiyear deal Wednesday morning.
PlayMaker, which recently won the 2026 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference startup competition in the $500,000-plus funding category, uses AI to help pull out key dates and deliverables of sponsorship deals while also helping users build deal proposals and act as a management hub that monitors those various lifecycles. Mercury13’s three clubs add to a growing soccer stable for the startup, including MLS’s Austin FC, the NWSL’s San Diego Wave FC and the USL’s Carolina Ascent FC. It’s worth noting that this is a tool available to any sports franchise, not just soccer (the TGL’s Bay Golf Club and others use it).
Sorkin said that because this is PlayMaker’s first dealings with an ownership group, it came with some adaptations of the platform. For example, PlayMaker can now support different languages and currencies to fit the preferences of business dealings for the clubs.
“That was something that we’ve always been really focused on: how can we provide out-of-the-box defaults to help someone do their job with PlayMaker as it is?” Sorkin said. “But then, how can we always allow for as much flexibility for an organization as possible? It’s been a great challenge.”
There will be a phased rollout of PlayMaker through the organizations, Harno said. Club commercial managers are using it now, and the existing CRM is being folded in as well to house decision-making in one place. Finally, the teams’ social media teams will be added sometime this summer to better track the social deliverables associated with various campaigns.
While still in the early phases, Harno has received enough feedback already to know the organization is feeling a lift from PlayMaker’s tech.
“The whole point of us concentrating on female soccer teams, is the fact that we think that we can find economies of scale by implementing the right tech and bringing that kind of background that we have,” Harno said. “... I know there’s always like a period of adaptation in a club who have been using a certain way of doing things, but the reaction from the clubs has already been very good.”
