Proven needs, missing infrastructure
The analysis behind the creation of Invesport Partners starts with professional sport. Clubs invest heavily in their talent, yet very few have their own complete facility – assessment, physical preparation, recovery, medical and mental health support – together with the qualified staff to run it. The first consequence is player unavailability, and its cost is considerable: an estimated €3.45 billion in wages was paid between 2020 and 2025 to unavailable players across Europe’s five major football leagues, for 22,596 recorded injuries. The same gap exists at the other end of the spectrum, among elite amateur athletes: close to 550,000 registered triathlon and trail-running athletes in Western Europe train at loads approaching those of professionals, often well equipped with sensors, but with no supervised assessment or medical follow-up to interpret the data.
A similar need exists in the corporate world. Occupational health services fulfil a statutory prevention role that is by nature periodic and discontinuous: between two appointments, no one monitors employees’ physical condition and mental load over time. Absenteeism nonetheless represents an estimated annual cost of €120 billion for French companies alone, with psychological causes now accounting for more than a third of long-term sick leave. The issue also applies to entrepreneurs and senior executives, exposed to high levels of mental load with no structured support.
The need is more pressing still within emergency services and the armed forces. For firefighters, military personnel and units with high physical demands, physical condition is a condition of safety, and the preparation of teams needs to be strengthened. A recent US study measured that a majority of firefighters deploying on operations fell below the recommended VO₂max, while cardiovascular events are the leading cause of on-duty deaths.
A conviction: integration rather than one more area of expertise
Physiology and biomechanics, sports medicine, nutrition, sleep and recovery, sensors, data: all of this expertise already exists, but it remains scattered across players that do not talk to one another. Invesport Partners is convinced that the next step change will not come from one more area of expertise, but from bringing them together within a single operator: shared, scientifically validated protocols, centralised and usable data, and trained and certified teams.
In a lastingly constrained budgetary environment, the answer can no longer be for every organisation to equip itself on its own. It lies in pooling: one facility, the same protocols and the same teams serving several organisations within the same area, to monitor and optimise performance, both physical and mental.
This model already exists at scale in the United States, where “human performance” operators support elite athletes, the military and large corporations across several hundred sites. No equivalent exists in Europe today.
A network of regional performance hubs built on already proven protocols
This roll-out rests first on a technological core. Invesport Partners has acquired a stake in HumanFab (a transaction announced in a separate release today), a centre of expertise in sport, health and industry based in Aix-en-Provence since 2010. Across more than 3,000 m², HumanFab brings together a movement analysis laboratory, a performance institute and a sports medicine clinic, around three disciplines: physiology, biomechanics and neuroscience. Fifteen years of measurement have produced the protocols, the database and the proprietary software that automates their processing. It is these protocols and algorithms that the network will deploy across the regions.
The model takes the form of a hub-and-spoke network: HumanFab as the reference centre, producing the research, validating the protocols, training and certifying the teams and centralising the data; and regional hubs of 600 to 700 m², operated under franchise to the same standards, close to clubs, companies and other users.
Each hub will bring together on a single floor a performance arena, a measurement laboratory, an environmental training space, a recovery area and a medical and return-to-play rehabilitation unit. The pathway will be the same for everyone: initial assessment, individualised programme, supervised execution, protocol-driven recovery, then a documented re-test every three to six months. Each re-test will enrich the shared database in Aix-en-Provence: the wider the network grows, the sharper the protocols become.
Four segments will be targeted as a priority, in an addressable market Invesport Partners estimates at €500 million in Western Europe:
– professional clubs, across all sports;
– companies, for the health, performance, attractiveness and retention of their teams;
– elite amateur athletes, particularly in endurance sports;
– the armed forces and emergency services, for whom physical condition is a condition of safety.
Construction of the first hub, planned in Pau, is due to start in 2027 for an opening in 2029, with a target network of five hubs within five years.
Rodolphe Besserve, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Invesport Partners, said: “The methods that make the world’s best sporting organisations win are no longer a secret: they are documented, published, and their effects have been measured. What is missing is not the science, it is its day-to-day execution, and an operator able to make it available beyond the handful of organisations that can afford to build it in-house.”
Tom Gauquelin, co-founder and Deputy Chief Executive Officer, added: “Our model is designed to rest on a base of recurring revenue and on disciplined execution: every hub will be built to the same standard, will apply the same protocols developed with HumanFab and will feed the same database. That is what makes the network replicable.”
About Invesport Partners
Founded in 2026 and based in Paris, Invesport Partners is an investment and consolidation platform for profitable small and mid-sized businesses operating mainly in the sport and wellbeing sectors in Europe. As an active holding company, it takes majority or minority stakes and works closely with its portfolio companies on their strategy, governance, organisation and external growth. Its industrial project is to unify the management of human performance within a single operator and to deploy it through a network of regional hubs. It brings executives, key managers and strategic partners into its share capital, and conducts its activity in accordance with ethical principles set out in a dedicated charter.
This press release constitutes neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy any financial securities. The projections it contains are based on assumptions that may not materialise.
Further information at: https://www.invesport-partners.com/
Company – Founding Partners, Rodolphe Besserve, Stéphane Blanchet, Steve Denton, Laurent Prud’homme, Tom Gauquelin
Legal counsel – Squair, Renan Lombard-Platet
Press contact
Rodolphe Besserve – rbesserve@invesport-partners.com – +33 6 62 26 84 94