How Leo MacLehose and Dominic Collingwood became sports-pub matchmakers

View from the Top: MatchPint connects users looking to watch the game with pubs near them who are showing it, and the firm is taking the idea worldwide

MacLehose (left) and Collingwood want people to ditch their phones for the theatre of live sport (MatchPint)

Leo MacLehose and Dominic Collingwood met on their first day of school, aged 13, sitting in the same row for double biology; by the weekend they were both playing in the second row in the rugby team; now, aged 30, they run MatchPint, the app that connects fans and pubs. “We didn’t win a game in our first season,” Collingwood recalls. “But we had a great last season. We’re resilient and dogged.”

I meet them at their HQ in Finsbury Square, London, where all the talk is of the first matches of the new Premiership season. MacLehose, who is half-French and half-Scottish, says that he was inspired by an experience of once trying to find a pub to watch a French rugby game, but in vain. “I knew it would be showing somewhere, I just didn’t know where.” Now you can find the most esoteric game you can imagine not too far from your door. MacLehose proved the point by showing me the best location for watching a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and Oakland Athletic – “and it’s 8 minutes walk from here!” QED.

MacLehose and Collingwood both cheerfully accept that they are privileged white guys. They went to the King’s School, Canterbury, one of the oldest in the country. In the “Young Entrepreneurs” class they made boxer shorts in their house colours and sold them for a fiver. MacLehose went on to study international business and economics at the University of Manchester while Collingwood became a choral scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied theology and was frequently called upon to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in a counter-tenor voice. “A knowledge of medical ethics and the ability to sing Handel arias are not obvious qualifications for a business career,” says Collingwood. But the two of them remained good friends, bonded not so much by playing sports together as by watching them in pubs.