Tue 13th May 2025 - Toca Social partners with Sandbox VR for Westfield opening this summer, opportunity for further partnerships and investment Toca Social partners with Sandbox VR for Westfield opening this summer, opportunity for further partnerships and investment: Interactive football bar concept Toca Social has partnered with virtual reality brand Sandbox VR for its Westfield opening this summer and told Propel it sees the opportunity for further partnerships and investment. Toca Social currently has sites in London’s O2 and Birmingham’s Bullring, and will launch its third UK location, at Westfield White City, on Tuesday, 1 July. A few thousand square feet of the 30,000 square-foot former Debenhams site will now be operated by Sandbox VR, which is being rolled out here by franchisee VR Entertainment and which has three locations – two in London and one in Birmingham. “We’re always looking for different activities and things we can offer within our venues,” Toca Social president Alex Harman told Propel. “We had a look at who we thought in the marketplace would be most complimentary with our experience and we always thought VR was an interesting thing to explore. We visited a number of VR players, and in our experience, Sandbox was the standout. We met their team, built up a good relationship with them, and they were keen to launch a venue into Westfield London as well. They’re operating within a portion of our venue – operating independently – but where there are ways we can work together, we will.” Asked whether this opened up the possibility of future Toca Social-Sandbox VR partnerships, Harman said: “All options are on the table at this point. Toca Social will always be the driving force of our experience, but there are definitely opportunities, with pockets of space within the venues, to work with other partners where we think they are complimentary. It’s definitely a conversation we’re open to, but it’s reasonably site-specific. But our core strategy remains focused on Toca Social, and most of our sites will be purely Toca Social.” At 30,000 square feet, White City will be Toca Social’s largest site yet, building on The O2 (17,000 square feet) and Birmingham (23,000 square feet). And while Harman said bigger sites are becoming ever more necessary as the current ones get booked up at peak times, the Toca Social operating model can also see it fit into smaller neighbourhood locations too. “We tend to be booked out reasonably far in advance in peak periods, so we needed more capacity to meet that demand,” he said. “Future sites will be market specific. For the bigger markets like London, we’re focused on the larger sites. Our biggest challenge at the moment is having the capacity to reach peak demand, so for the big markets we’re looking at larger venues, but we’re also looking at smaller models for smaller markets – we have different shapes and sizes for different markets. Very excited about the mall model, as shopping malls continue to reorient their models away from primarily retail to lots of leisure as well, we see plenty of opportunity for us there. We’re looking at some pretty broad markets in the UK with our flexible model format – ultimately good urban markets with football interest, entertainment industries and core demographics of young people, families and corporates. We have broad appeal, which means we can look broadly about where we go.” Harman has previously said Toca Social is aiming for 20-30 UK sites in the long term but would not be drawn on where or when it would go next. What is for certain is that following White City, focus will shift overseas as the concept launches in France and the US. “We’e breaking ground on Paris very shortly with a view to opening at the beginning of next year, for our first site in continental Europe, with Monterey opening a similar sort of time,” Harman said. “We recently started construction on our first US site, in Dallas. We’re partnering with the MLS for that one, which will be incredibly exciting for us. Soccer is growing exponentially in the US market, and there’s an incredible amount of excitement over the World Cup there next year. Back home, The O2 is performing extremely well, with several hundred thousand visitors each year, and we still see really strong growth there. It’s approaching and often reaching double digits revenue growth there, which is really encouraging for year four of the venue. Birmingham has gone extremely well too and seeing a lot of the same positive trends we saw at The O2. We’ve managed to incorporate various learnings and it's slightly ahead of where The O2 was at the same stage.” Last year, parent company Toca Football raised $100m in private offerings to accelerate its global growth, and Harman said seeking further investment is always on the table. “Scale up businesses like ours are always looking for ways to accelerate their growth, and additional investment is always going to be one of those,” he added. “We completed a pretty substantial fundraising round last year, which has given us the ability to grow relatively fast in the coming years, but I think we’re always open to going faster.”