Pavel Krbec: the mathematician coding Flashscore’s upgrade

Flashscore CEO Pavel Krbec was working on LLMs long before ChatGPT became a thing.

Born into a family of mathematicians in Prague, numbers were coded into his genes. Both of his parents studied mathematics. His sister followed suit. Krbec eventually studied computer science and mathematics before pursuing a PhD in academia.

“At the time, my research focused on a relatively small field called language modelling,” he says. “Nowadays everybody knows what it is, but back then it wasn't particularly popular or widely known.” His work took him to IBM Research during and after his study, including time at its global headquarters in the US, where he worked on some of the early algorithms behind speech recognition and machine translation.

But academia was not Krbec’s only hidden talent. While studying, he was also a committed rugby player, competing in the Czech Republic’s second-highest league and continuing to play during a stint at John Hopkins in the US.

Krbec’s diverse background has proved useful in his current role. Apart from his passion for sports, his technical grounding means he can challenge Flashscore’s engineering and IT teams rather than simply accepting whatever lands in front of him.

“I still understand the world of algorithms and programming well,” he says. “My background allows me to challenge the teams in our IT and engineering departments at Flashscore. So the know-how is still highly relevant.”

Swapping academia for challenges

While academia provided a stable career, Krbec eventually had to question whether the lifestyle was what he truly wanted.

“I felt that if I didn't make a move then, I would stay in academia forever. The academic world moves relatively slowly. It doesn't have the same kind of intense challenges you find in business,” he recalls. “I asked myself whether that comfortable life was really what I wanted for my future. The answer was no.”

Driven by curiosity about a faster-paced environment, Krbec spent 15 years working in management positions at media and financial services companies. The iGaming sector, however, was absent from his CV until Flashscore came calling.

For Krbec, the appeal had a lot to do with the company’s predominantly Czech set-up. In Prague, he explains, many sizeable businesses are ultimately satellites of groups headquartered elsewhere, leaving major decisions subject to approval.

“Flashscore is one of the few major companies headquartered in the Czech Republic where decision-making remains local,” he explains. “Decision-making is extremely fast. We have a single ownership structure, which means we don't need to navigate complicated corporate structures and lengthy approval processes.”

Enter the jungle 

While he had prior exposure to affiliate models through his previous work, what surprised Krbec in iGaming was the difference in visibility.

“One thing that immediately struck me is that affiliate business in our industry is much less transparent than in online insurance,” he recalls. “In insurance, for example, everything is incredibly transparent. Insurance companies let you see every number. You can audit everything. Nothing can simply disappear.

“Compared to that, affiliate business in sports betting and iGaming can feel like a jungle.”

Three years into the role, Krbec says the industry as a whole hasn’t changed much. While some companies have become more transparent since, he says there are still “many unanswered questions and too many ‘skeletons in the closet’”. The lack of transparency is especially alarming when players disappear from reporting, as it can be difficult to fathom why.

At Flashscore, the team has been raising these issues consistently with its partners, and Krbec hopes for a more standardised space in the not-so-distant future.

More than scores

Beyond advocating for transparency, much of Krbec’s time as CEO has been devoted to broadening what Flashscore itself offers users. Most recently, the team revamped its player rating system in collaboration with legendary goalkeeper Petr Cech. Krbec says the team now has the best expected-goals coverage for “virtually every important match”.

But the company didn’t stop at data. In the past few years, Krbec has pushed the company to break an older perception of Flashscore as somewhere users visit only to check a score before immediately leaving, by growing its news and editorial content.

The brand’s ambitions have grown geographically too. In 2024, Flashscore completed its first major acquisition: the Spanish football platform BeSoccer, strengthening its position in the country and transforming the company from “a Czech company based in Prague” into “an international company with significant operations in Spain”.

On Flashscore’s expansion strategy, Krbec explains that it starts with one simple question: how much does a country care about football? “Football is our DNA, so naturally we focus on countries where football is deeply embedded in the culture,” he says.

This means LatAm countries – particularly Brazil – sit high on the priority list, alongside established European markets. Meanwhile, tennis and basketball are Flashscore’s second and third-largest sports, giving the business another route into markets where football does not dominate to the same extent, such as the US.

The global focus is also where Krbec’s AI background comes in handy. While he is wary of using AI to pump out sloppy articles, it has become “an integral part” of the brand’s multilingual newsroom and marketing team as a translation tool. Another major area has been software development, where AI is used to refactor older code, a historically labour-intensive task that Krbec says can now be completed much faster.

“I believe the software industry is going through a major transformation. We're moving toward a world where AI agents write much of the code, and humans guide them in the right direction,” Krbec adds.

13 billion World Cup views 

Flashscore’s operation was put to the test during this year’s World Cup.

According to Krbec, the company spent the entire previous year preparing for the tournament and achieved its highest-ever daily users record during the competition, generating close to 13 billion views across the event. The newsroom also published more than 18,000 World Cup-related articles. The Flashscore app has also been downloaded over four million times in the UK, with more than two billion monthly impressions and users spending close to 30 minutes per day on average within the app.

Interestingly, the tournament itself was not Flashscore’s most difficult challenge. With relatively few matches taking place simultaneously, Krbec says the final day of the Champions League league phase can put greater pressure on infrastructure because of the sheer volume of fixtures running all at once.

Commercially, though, the World Cup was a premium window for acquisition. Krbec notes that national team participation can dramatically affect audience behaviour.

“Take Italy, for example. Italy didn't qualify for the World Cup, and you could clearly see lower levels of engagement there as a result,” he explains. “That makes the tournament an excellent acquisition opportunity, but it only lasts for a limited time.

“However, that's now history. My focus has already shifted to the Premier League and Champions League.”

The road to 200 million

Flashscore has already hit one major target. In 2020, the company set itself the goal of reaching 150 million users and eventually got there. Now Krbec has another number in mind – to exceed 200 million users.

He highlights LatAm as the strongest growth region, given that the brand has already shown how deeply it can embed itself among football followers in Portugal and its home territory of the Czech Republic.

However, one thing unlikely to feature in that expansion story, at least for now, is an IPO. Krbec says Flashscore remains happy as a privately owned company.

“Public companies devote significant resources to reporting, compliance and investor communications. From my previous experience, I know how demanding that can be,” he explains. “At the moment, there are no plans to go public.”

Flashscore’s global presence has at times made Krbec feel like a celeb. In France, he’s seen taxi drivers using two phones – one for navigation and another displaying Flashscore results.

“Examples like that make me smile,” he says. “I'd like to see that image replicated all around the world.”

For a mathematician by birth who once worried that failing to move would leave him stuck in research forever, Krbec has proven himself a natural entrepreneur, too.