Show HN: I made a football/soccer formation and squad app

[chocoboaus2]

Inspired by watching my sons coach using a carry around whiteboard, plus also starting to coach my wifes over 30s womens amateur team I wrote a mobile app for amateur football/soccer coaches.

It allows you to add your players information, manage substitutions during games (who's on the field, whos on the bench) as well as drag around players into formations, draw tactics on the screen and share using the IOS share features to email, messages etc. Build your tactic and share it with the team between games.

It's free and its designed to just be an easy thing for coaches to take around with them and has no cost.

I know I'm not the first to do this but many of them are targeted towards professional coaches and a lot more complex than they need to be in my opinion. Some are attached to expensive hardware subscriptions for more in-depth player management than amateur coaches need.

Appreciate any feedback and thanks for giving it a go if you do :)

[kcaseg]

Nice!I would reconsider the AI icon, I know it is a free app, but I am sure there are other free alternatives for that. Not because AI is inherently bad or anything, I just somehow associate it with low quality/scammy stuff and my brain would probably filter it out when scrolling through the app store.

[chocoboaus2]

Thanks for the feedback, agree how some would look at this on the app store, will see what i can do about changing it!

[mbreese]

I think this is a great app. Thanks for sharing! Not many people target the amateur levels for Apps, so something like this would be very much appreciated. I only ever coached at youth levels, and very limited at that… but, when I was coaching this would have been very helpful.

A couple of quick observations:

When you move a player for the second time, their circle/icon jumps. Is this intentional to move them away from your finger, or is this a bug? I find it distracting if it was intentional, but maybe that’s just me.

Seeing as how it’s an iOS app in the App Store, I’d consider using the Apple share icon (box with an arrow pointing up) instead of the Android share icon (connected dots).

When you enter drawing mode, it was confusing to me if it was active or not. I know the icon changes from a pencil to a pencil with a slash through it, but I was confused as to if it was active or not. One thing to consider might be having an “active” mode at a time. For example: A finger for moving players around, a marker for drawing, a share icon, a save icon, etc. Then deemphasizing the icon for the currently non-active states (dimmer, grayscale, smaller, something…). Notability is an app that does this well, if you’re looking for an example.

It would be nice to be able to save formations and cycle/swipe through them.

It might be nice to include a placeable ball icon to show where the ball is in a formation. (In addition to the whiteboard mode).

This is way more complicated, but when coaching, I always wanted a connected graph layout for player positions so that when would move on player (to attack the ball, for example), they would drag the other players around, maintaining shape. Super complicated, but very handy.

Finally, and you might appreciate this too, but another thing I really wanted was a in-game mode. A mode that kept track of time and subs. Then after the game, I’d have a record/report of how much everyone played, how often they were subbed, etc. I always wanted more of a record than my post-game marked up paper copy of lineups.

Thanks again for sharing. This will certainly be of use in the future! Best of luck to you and your wife’s team!

[chocoboaus2]

Thank you for the feedback and ideas.

It's funny you mention a game timer, i've actually got that down as a potential next iteration idea because yeah we do for example set out (injuries aside) interchanges that will happen at 20 minutes etc so timing that down might be useful for sure. It started off as a tactics only app but its slowly evolving into a game management app to (when i added subs during development, an originally unscoped feature) so it would make sense to go further now for sure.

The idea about the ball being placeable is a fantastic one that I will look to add, and yes saving formations is something i have on my wishlist too.

Thanks for the feedback, appreciate it!.

[wasma]

This is amazing! It'll be like having my own team on the Football Manager tactics page :D

[chocoboaus2]

Thanks for the feedback, I'm a big FM player myself :)

[oneeyedpigeon]

This is "football (soccer)" rather than "football (American) or soccer", right?

[wasma]

Looks so.