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Behind The Brand: Elite Sport
One of the world’s fastest growing goalkeeper gloves brands has secured a growing list of significant endorsees…
The goalkeeping world has seen its fair share of father-son duos. Peter and Kasper Schmeichel. Miguel and Pepe Reina. Bryan and Angus Gunn. The list goes on.
In the goalkeeper glove industry, one family-oriented business has made waves in the market in recent years. Elite Sport is led by father and son duo Yaron Daniel and his eldest son Or. The brand was founded along family lines following Yaron’s search for a quality yet affordable pair of gloves for another one of his sons.
“I wasn’t even a massive football fan!”, jokes Yaron, speaking to Goalkeeper.com from an office in the Netherlands about the brand’s inception.
“My middle son is on the autistic spectrum and wanted to start playing football. One afternoon, he went to a practice with his school at the time. The school was for kids with additional needs, and they worked with the biggest club in our area. He ended up being a very good goalkeeper” he explains.
“The club took him from the original school to a mainstream one to play football, and of course he needed some gloves. I went to the shop maybe 13, 14 years ago, and as a proud father, obviously wanted to buy him the best gloves available. They were very expensive and within about two weeks, the latex was ripped and the gloves were in a state.
“I went back to the shops and showed them the latex and I said guys, what is that? I paid a lot of money and the latex was in a really bad way. And they laughed at me because they said ‘oh this is the life of the gloves’. We bought a different brand but they also cost a lot.”
“I had a company that did quality control, and I started researching how to make goalkeeper gloves. I found out where you buy the latex, which companies produced gloves, and started to make gloves just to sell in our country to begin with.”
Elite Sport was born with a clear vision: to provide high-quality goalkeeper gloves accessible to all levels of competition. Under the leadership of Yaron Daniel, CEO and founder, the company has rapidly expanded its presence in the most demanding markets worldwide, always committed to excellence.
“We wanted to make a ‘social brand’ that has high durability with a normal price. It’s true it cannot be really really cheap, because you cannot get quality with a really cheap price”, Yaron admits. “From there, it really just grew by itself.”
“The same seller who sold my father the gloves a few years before, for my brother, became our first distributor”, Or adds. In fact, it was with that distributor that Or first gained experience in the goalkeeper glove industry, says Yaron, explaining how he “learned the job from the bottom up.”
The experience Or gained on the ground in those early years helped bring the brand closer to customers.
“When you have been a salesman in a shop for a few years, you hear the feedback from the youth. From the parents. From everybody. It makes it easier to make modifications for your gloves”, explains Yaron. Ultimately, it’s user feedback that drives Elite’s development, rather than following the trends. For the Elite chief, the trends that really matter are the trends parents and kids describe. “The colours that mothers and fathers want give us a good system behind our designs!” he jokes.
Fast forward to 2024, the growth of Elite Sport is not just the result of its founder’s passion but a well-structured organisation supported by strategic commercial partners around the globe. With a presence in countries like China, Japan, Europe, and Latin America, the company has demonstrated its ability to adapt into different markets.
Whereas other goalkeeper brands, and major sportswear providers, have diversified their product offering, Elite are intentionally staying put in the goalkeeper glove lane. Yaron explains how there are other brands that will sell more or less in different countries, often based on cultural fashions that make certain brands more or less popular, and will sometimes introduce other products to target more markets.
However, for Elite, the focus is on perfecting the goalkeeper gloves they produce, rather than constantly searching for product expansion.
“We throw a lot of gloves out in the production process. Our mantra has always been: design of a Ferrari, quality of a Mercedes, and the price of a Toyota. That means a lot of quality control - especially when you are trying to maintain the price that we know. The good part is that we get very very few returns, even from our retailers, which we think says a lot."
A challenge for most goalkeeper glove brands nowadays is cutting through the noise. Marketing buzzwords and PR stunts come in abundance in the goalkeeper glove industry, which can make it difficult for customers to understand the true differences between brands. However, on the part of the brands themselves, sales often come from mastering two arenas: social media, and endorsements.
Elite now sports names such as Jose Sa and Thibaut Courtois as its flagship ambassadors. But they grew from the bottom up, “with Facebook and with my car”, as Yaron recalls
“At the start, we wished we could have had goalkeepers like Jose and Thibaut join us! We had a few endorsees for a few years but really we started marketing with Facebook. And, more importantly, I would go by car and by plane to each of the distributors I could find in the world. We literally went with a big bag of gloves and presented them to each shop. I was basically a classic salesman for many years around the world.”
Back in the days where a Facebook account could grow to thousands of followers in little time at all, social media was a goldmine for small and medium enterprises. But nowadays, as Yaron and Or warn, innovation can sometimes be crowded out by whoever shouts the loudest. Social media sometimes can actually prevent true innovation from breaking through.
“People buy stories”, muses Yaron.
“Scrolling and scrolling, people buy stories and buy what is beautiful. They don't look at the stitching, the shape of the gloves, the structure of the gloves, the package of the gloves, the quality control…that’s what is more difficult to convey.”
Or adds: “Customers are not always looking at innovations, they care about the relativity of the glove to who's playing with it, how it looks, and whether it will fit their kit, or will fit the boots that they’re wearing. As my father says, it has become a fashion.”
It’s this modern nature which has conversely encouraged Elite to double down on the quality of their product. “Even if it costs more, we need to keep the quality and protect our brand. In the long run, that’s what’s best for the brand. When you look at the big international retailers, if we make one mistake, you potentially jeopardise a relationship”, he explains.
Big endorsement agreements don’t just come out of thin air. It’s this mantra of quality over everything that brought Real Madrid number one Courtois to Elite last year.
“We got a message from our distributor in Belgium asking whether we could make an offer for Thibaut to wear our gloves. I said that first, we need to know if Thibaut actually likes the gloves. He had big offers from lots of companies. He tested the gloves and he was really happy. That was honestly most of the story!” begins Yaron.
Or continues, explaining how previous relationships helped strengthen Elite’s pitch. “The basis of it was that Simon Mignolet, who was already wearing our gloves after leaving Nike, was one of our first major endorsees in the major leagues and tournaments. Thibaut noticed that Simon was a fan, and so he came to know of us.”
“When he decided to move from Nike, Thibaut had to check out the market. He had the opportunity to check every brand. I can tell you that. We can’t compete with the offers of the big brands. They offer amounts that we cannot. And yet Thibaut goes for our gloves, not for the money. That's one of the things we love about working with him”, adds Yaron.
“It was similar with Jose [Sa]. He had a bigger offer, but chose the gloves for the quality. He told me something really interesting. Jose said that when he was younger, he did not come from wealth. Now he is wealthy, he doesn’t want more. He wants good quality and security.”
Helping the everyday customer understand exactly what it is about Elite’s gloves, in terms of the quality of construction, that means leading goalkeepers favour them, is still a challenge for the industry at large.
“I don't think people are aware of the quality of the latex. That's the problem. They have a lot of gloves that they put a tag outside, ‘German something’. And people think oh it's a German latex. I can assure you, they have a lot of tricks”, muses Yaron.
“We know that we buy the latex directly from Germany. You can count on one hand the brands that do that. So most of the clients don't know what they have. The tricks that they show them with noise or grip.”
Elite Sport's success wouldn’t have been possible without the network of commercial partners they have established worldwide. "We work closely with our partners globally to ensure our products reach every corner of the planet, from specialised stores to online platforms," Yaron explains.
He tells a story about the recent Copa America tournament that reaffirmed Elite’s belief that they were doing the right thing when it came to ensuring latex quality. In the middle of the Copa America, Yaron got a call from their distributor from Mexico. The Puma ball they were using had been slipping through the hands of some of the goalkeepers in training. “So I asked to get the model of the ball”, he says.
“We went through extra testing to make sure that all of the gloves for our goalkeepers were optimised to deal with that ball and the conditions they were most frequently playing in during the tournament.”
“When it comes to latex, the big brands can make small changes by request and can pay for exclusivity. Brands tend to have different asks. Usually, we try to find the balance between grip and durability. That's our secret, it takes time to find it but we always make the ask of the factory.”
“Some brands also have ‘two tiers’ of gloves”, explains Or. “They will have their professional gloves, and then they’ll have replica gloves for kids. They’ll just use two types of latex. But we try to use a different quality of latex that will match the position that the goalkeeper is playing. If the goalkeeper is playing on astroturf, we have latex that is mostly usable on astroturf. If they are on wet surfaces, we have a different range.”
“I honestly know a lot of brands don’t even know what latex they are getting”, Yaron admits.
“Even when we’re using the latex from Germany, we’re still sending gloves out for testing with youth and professional goalkeepers all over the world to see how they perform in different conditions. We ask what they like, don’t like, how they perform over different lengths of time. We even ask them not to wash them a few times to see how the latex holds”, the father-son duo explains.
The goalkeeper glove industry faces consolidation challenges in the coming years, and Yaron and Or admit that they are being conservative with what the next major innovation will be. They self-profess their obsession with meticulous iteration and testing, and watching the movements of the market to see what sticks. As Or says, “there are still a lot of goalkeepers who want to play with more traditional structured gloves.”
There are also a number of design features that have almost disappeared from the market. “The roll finger is nowhere near as popular. The full latex backhand, almost nobody uses it anymore. But we also want to allow the individual customer to make that choice.”
This mantra plays into the “spirit of the brand” that Yaron and Or are keen to get across as we come towards the end of our conversation. The Elite brand has given them and several others a career in an industry they didn’t imagine would become a life for them.
“The biggest validation for me is when you have a sponsored goalkeeper who is signed to X number of pairs a season, and finishes the season with fewer pairs. Goalkeepers don't like to change their gloves when they are working well.
“The way we operate is the way we grew up and were raised. That way is to ensure that when the goalkeeper puts on a pair of our gloves, they feel happy. They and their parents feel like they got a good product for a fair price.
Though Elite Sport has grown significantly, the mission that its founder started with remains intact. The company maintains a strong social commitment, supporting goalkeepers with disabilities and collaborating with charitable causes. "We want to give back to the sport that has given us so much," Yaron says. “It’s part of our identity as a company.”
Today, Elite is more than a family business. It’s a global company with a clear mission: to provide goalkeepers worldwide with the tools they need to be the best in their position, without compromising on quality or price.
“This company is not going to make me a billionaire”, Yaron jokes, “but it is a mission. It started with positive intentions - to help my son - and we will only continue in this kind of way. Whenever we have the opportunity to help a cause or goalkeepers with disabilities or things like this, we are right there. We want to be there. Because that is what our brand is. That’s where we started.”
You can visit the Elite Sport website here.