Finding a place to play our national sport should be easy, but ask any football fan in Egypt and they'll tell you organising a match is impossible. Luckily, one start-up we met at the RiseUp Summit has tackled (pun intended) this problem.

Staff Writer

Nov 26, 2013

One of the start-ups that caught our eye at the recent Rise Up Summit was GoMal3ab.com, a website founded by three university students Ibrahim Gharbawi, May Tarek and Mohammed Fayez, that allows you to book for a any football pitch around Cairo online. Their aim is to organise and revolutionise the amateur sports scene in Egypt, making playing matches more convenient and eventually launching their own year-round football tournaments. Having started this month, they already received 500 registrations in the first 24 hours and have started taking bookings.

The best start-ups in Egypt are usually the simple ones, that pin-point a specific issue that plagues a large portion of like-minded people. “We saw how our friends always struggled in booking a pitch and creating a game. We saw an opportunity in the sports sector, especially in Egypt where there is only one dominating sport and if you're not a member of a club, you have no where to play. So we saw a gap and we knew we can create a venture with a purpose; we just had to do some research and studies," Fayez told us, adding that he himself isn’t much of an athlete. GoMal3ab takes away the hassle of finding a pitch and calling random numbers with their integrated operating system with the venues listed on the website, categorised into different areas. "Through GoMal3ab, a user can instantly browse all the current schedules of the courts in a very user friendly interface and browse pitches by area, date, and time. Also, rather than visiting the pitch only to pay a deposit for a confirmation, the user can pay the cash deposit (which never exceeds 50%) at any Kiosk or outlet that uses "Fawry" or "Bee" or pay online using the credit card (credit cards will be available in December). Most importantly, when users book through GoMal3ab, they win reward points which later they can use it to redeem free hours and merchandise."