Vicente Fernandez

A keyboard that knows the score

When a player crosses the goal line, somewhere a SportsManias emoji animates the exact celebration - the strut, the spin, the signature pose - and a fan drops it into a group chat before the replay airs. That is the small, specific machine Vicente Fernandez built. Not a sports app exactly. A way for fan passion to leak into messaging and stories, officially licensed, frame by frame.

Fernandez is co-founder and CEO of SportsManias, the Miami company that calls itself the leader in animated sports emojis and augmented reality filters. The product line sounds like a novelty until you notice who signs off on it: the NFL Players Association, leagues, athletes whose likenesses are licensed down to the touchdown dance. In 2019, SportsManias and TikTok put the first officially licensed NFL player AR stickers in front of Super Bowl fans. That had never been done before.

He runs a company of roughly a dozen people that has raised around $10.5 million, built partnerships that bigger studios chase, and turned a deceptively goofy idea - emojis - into a rights-heavy media business. The path there runs through a Division III football field, a college newspaper, a film set, and one phone call from his mother.

The phone call

The pitch did not come from a venture partner or an accelerator. It came from his mother, Aymara Del Aguila, who watched her son consume sports the way other people breathe and saw a business in the more addicted niche of fans. She called. She had an idea for a real-time platform. He was a teenager. He said yes.

That is how SportsManias started in 2012: a website and app delivering personalized, real-time feeds for diehard fans and fantasy players, then evolving into the emoji and AR business it is known for now. Mother and son as co-founders is a setup most people would run from. Fernandez treats it as a feature, not a bug - the relationship outlasts any disagreement about a product roadmap.

It helps that he came to the idea already wired for it. His mother worked at an ad agency and brought him to commercial shoots as a kid. In one of them, a young Vicente looked into a camera and announced he wanted to be a sports broadcaster. The career was hiding in plain sight for years before the phone rang.

Football player, sports editor, film kid

Fernandez grew up in Miami and went to Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, where he played on a football team that made a run at a state championship and credits a teacher, Mr. Maza, with shaping his voice as a writer. His coach, Coach Stuart, did something that quietly redirected his life: he connected him to the University of Chicago.

Chicago is not where you go to be a jock, and it is famously not where you go to start a company. Fernandez did both. He played football all four years for the Maroons while majoring in Cinema and Media Studies. He became Sports Editor of The Chicago Maroon inside his first year. He co-founded and co-led Maroon TV, the school’s first television station. He started a student organization for people chasing sports careers and built the first internship pipeline between the university and the Chicago Bulls.

On the side he wrote scripts, shot camera for University of Miami baseball, broadcast Hurricanes tennis, and shadowed the set of Divergent. The throughline was never one sport or one medium. It was the machinery of how stories about sports get made and shared.

Why a film degree built a sports-tech company

The Cinema and Media Studies background is not a footnote. SportsManias is, at its core, a content and rights operation: animation, licensing, athlete likeness, story formats for social platforms. A founder who understands production and intellectual property is better equipped to build animated, licensed sports content than one who only understands code. The varsity football years supplied the rest - the time management and competitive stubbornness he credits to being a student-athlete.

Officially licensed fan passion

SportsManias makes the things fans reach for in the heat of a game: animated emojis of real players doing their real celebrations, AR stickers and face filters tied to leagues and events, and a real-time news app with feeds personalized to the teams and players you actually follow. The emoji keyboard reflects game time and top moments - it changes with the season and the score.

The hard part is not the animation. It is the rights. Putting a real athlete’s celebration into a sticker that fans can legally share requires deals with players associations, leagues, and brands. That is the moat, and it is why a partnership like the NFLPA one matters more than any single download number.

A first nobody else had

In 2016, SportsManias partnered with the NFL Players Association to build real-time animated player emojis. The following year, the NFLPA named the company its Licensee of the Year for Best Digital Breakout Product. Then came the partnership that put a stake in the ground: SportsManias and TikTok launched the first officially licensed NFL player AR stickers, timed to the Super Bowl, letting fans drop top players’ touchdown celebrations onto their own videos.

“First” is a word that gets thrown around loosely in tech. Here it is literal - the first officially licensed NFL player augmented reality stickers, period. For a company of around thirteen people based in Miami, beating the industry to that milestone is the kind of fact that earns the partnerships that come next.

The timeline

Honors, in no particular order

The operator

Talk to him about how to build a career and the advice is unglamorous and consistent: be transparent, follow up, network relentlessly, treat your name as a brand, and start before you are ready. He learned time management the hard way, balancing a varsity football schedule with editing a newspaper and running a TV station. None of it was theoretical.

He is also proof that the obvious path is sometimes the right one. The kid who told a camera he wanted to do sports media grew up to do exactly that - just through a door nobody could have drawn in advance, somewhere between an emoji keyboard and an augmented reality filter.

The company stayed in Miami, not San Francisco or New York, and that matters to the story. SportsManias runs out of South Florida with a small team and a stack of partnerships that would flatter a company ten times its size. It is a reminder that the most interesting sports-tech is not always built where the conferences happen. Sometimes it is built where someone grew up watching the games.

Passion, packaged

Strip away the leagues and the licensing and the bet underneath SportsManias is simple: fans want to express themselves, and the closer that expression sits to the real moment - the real player, the real celebration, the second it happens - the more it spreads. Most companies chase attention. Fernandez chased the small window between something happening on a field and a fan needing to say something about it.

That is why the work shows up as emojis and stickers and filters rather than another scores app. It meets fans where they already are: in the group chat, in the story, in the reply. The product is almost invisible, which is the point. The best fan tools disappear into the conversation and leave only the feeling behind.