Product Vision¶
One-liner¶
A privately owned, real-time tracking system for a youth football team — each player streams live position (and later movement) to the coach's tablet during training and matches, with full ownership of the data and no per-player subscription.
The problem¶
A youth coach wants to track ~10 players and see performance live, during the session — not as a report synced after training. The journey started from a simpler question: "Can I build a mobile app that reads an existing football GPS tracker that already has its own app?" Investigating that surfaced two hard walls:
- Reading commercial trackers from the outside is effectively impossible. Consumer football trackers use closed, proprietary BLE protocols (undocumented GATT services), often with pairing encryption, and most store-and-sync to the vendor's cloud rather than streaming live. See market-analysis.md.
- The economics are wrong for youth football. The affordable devices are closed; the ones with open (cloud) APIs are expensive, subscription, pro-grade systems. "Cheap + open data" does not exist in one product.
The goal¶
Real-time + fully owned. Since no off-the-shelf product delivers live, open data at a youth-team price, the system is built in-house: a custom WiFi wearable per player plus an owned backend and coach UI. This trades hardware/firmware effort for complete control over the data and a one-time cost instead of recurring per-player fees.
Target user¶
- Primary: the coach of a single youth team (~10 players), watching live on a tablet on the touchline.
- Secondary (later): players/parents viewing personal stats, trends, and records.
Why this is achievable here¶
The owner is a full-stack engineer — the backend and UI are in their comfort zone. The real challenge is the firmware and pitch calibration, not the server. A real-time pipeline the coach controls end-to-end is a realistic build, not a research project.
Success criteria¶
- A coach sees live player dots on a calibrated pitch with sub-second latency.
- Equipping ~10 players costs a one-time amount in the low hundreds of EUR, with no subscription.
- All data is stored locally and is fully exportable/owned.
- Core physical metrics (distance, speed, sprints, heatmap) reach ~80% of what Catapult/STATSports sell — with live as the differentiator.