Mehdi
Jilali
Building products, experiences and new opportunities around sport.
Innovation and business development at Veepee. Then founder of GOMATCH, a sport marketplace I built, and then wound down.
The person behind the CV
Sport has
always been there.
Football at five. Judo. Mountains at the weekend. A gym, then running. Then running with other people.
How I got here
A fairly straight path.
With one constant: keep moving.
My father came from Morocco and built what he has by working for it. I grew up around that.
The turning point
Barcelona
Six in the morning. Forty people. Music, bad jokes, the sea on the right.
I didn't start running in Barcelona.
I remembered what it gave me.
Sport stopped being something I did on the side. It became the thing I wanted to work on.
The decision
I had to try.
I knew how to build projects. I knew what I loved. At some point the only honest thing left was to put the two together and see what happened.
GOMATCH. SportTech: open matches on reserved pitches, you book a slot, other players join, the game happens. I left a comfortable job and built it. It went through three names; the screens below carry the last one.
I didn't succeed in building what I wanted. But I succeeded in doing what I'd promised myself: trying for real.
On the projects I run professionally, I usually start with people: understand the problem, talk to users, build a rough POC, get feedback, then invest in the product.
With GOMATCH, I did the opposite.
I knew I could handle the business, product and project side. But I had never coded or built a digital product myself. So instead of first testing the idea with users, I decided to tackle that technical gap head-on, and spent too much time learning and building before validating the concept in the real world.
I inverted my own product-building sequence.
The result was simple: GOMATCH never made it to the real-world test that mattered most: a real pitch, with real players, on a real Saturday.
The other challenge was structural: selling access to public sports infrastructure meant a long public-sector sales cycle, making real-world validation even harder within the time available.
The experience still gave me something I didn't have before.
I started with a no-code tool because I couldn't write a line of code. Six months later, I was working with my own database, deployments and APIs.
I didn't build the company I set out to build. But I learned exactly how I want to build products next time:
Start with people. Validate the problem. Build only what needs to be built. Then go deeper.
And it settled the only question that mattered. Not a sector I find interesting.
The one I actually live in.
What I do
I work best
where these meet.
I'd like to stop
doing them separately.
Business development, new projects, product and customer experience, digital, events, running, wellness. I've done versions of most of these: some at Veepee, some on my own, never in the same job at the same time.
PSG is one of the few environments where sport, entertainment, community, digital and business genuinely operate as a single system. And this role isn't about running an existing product. It's about building what comes next.
I've followed the club since 2010.
The ecosystem
I looked a little closer.
A few places I spent time while thinking about this role.
One question I'd love to explore
The second We Run Paris, more than 15,000 runners expected, was called off two days before the start. What holds a running community together when the one date in the calendar disappears?
A heatwave, in June. Nobody could have planned around it, and that is the point: a race is a date, and a date is fragile. Running and wellness are a habit, and a habit is something a club can build, measure and keep. So the question I keep coming back to is what a member actually has from PSG on an ordinary Tuesday, in the months before a start line and in the months after it. And which part of that is worth paying for.
Not a proposal. I don't know the constraints, the data, or what's already in motion. It's the shape of question I find myself drawing, and the kind of problem I'd want to spend my time on.
Want to go deeper?
The website gives you the story. My LinkedIn gives you some of the substance behind it. A few projects, concrete numbers and examples of what I shipped at Veepee, and what I learned along the way.
The best way to go deeper is probably still to talk.