Analytics For Amateurs: The Startup Creating Real Life Player Cards For Grassroots Soccer

When they pitch the concept to amateur teenage soccer players, the reaction is always the same.

“We know everyone wants their real life player card,” Andrew Hall, co-founder of mobile tech startup Honer, told me in an interview.

“We’ve talked to hundreds of kids and asked ‘what do you think about getting your real life player card?’ Their eyes absolutely pop.”

The concept of a player card, which grades a soccer player’s key attributes out of 100, is well-known thanks to the global popularity of EA Sports’ FIFA soccer video games. In the game, professional players each have a card revealing how strong or weak they are in different skills.

Now, using augmented reality and artificial intelligence, Honer want to give grassroots players the opportunity to discover their own scores.

The London-based team is developing a mobile app which they say will allow any player on the planet to measure, analyse and improve their ability in dribbling, shooting, passing, agility, pace and ball control. 

The company expects to launch the app late this year or early 2021.

“Our attitude is: if you can measure it and benchmark it, you know where you’re at and then you know what you need to work on as a skill,” Hall said.

“We’re building off some exciting research out of Germany which was able to predict future player performance by measuring these six skills.

“The big problem is, if you ask a grassroots player or even a pro player, ‘how do you know you’re getting better?’ the answers are quite vague. It’s really about feel … ‘how many minutes did I play? Did I get an assist or a goal?’

“We wanted to make it quantitative by helping grade people in each of these skills through this technology that they can now access at home.”

Hall said the app will be free to download, with players needing only a phone and a few cones to complete the drills.

Each drill is setup using augmented reality and the app analyzes a player’s performance before providing a score and ranking of either bronze, silver, gold or platinum. The app leverages a talent base of more than 200,000 youth players to grade each player’s ability.

The commercial model for the app, is masterclass content for those who want to improve in specific skills.

Hall said the company was meeting with “some of the bigger names in European football” to recruit professional coaches and players to deliver masterclass videos.

“A bit like with healthcare, no one really wants to pay for the diagnostic, but when they know what’s not right, they’re prepared to pay deeply to improve or to get better,” Hall said.

European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has recognized the potential of the app. Honer, formerly known as Formalytics, is one of three startups signed by UEFA as part of an “innovation drive”.

Hall said the amateur players Honer had spoken to were highly-focused to improve, particularly those aged 12-16, and welcomed the possibility to benchmark themselves against other players.

The company, which is currently raising capital to take the product through to market, is also confident of promoting the app, given its previous success.

Working with soccer YouTube influencers Miniminter and Chris MD, Honer released their myKicks app just before the 2018 World Cup. Within five days of the influencer videos being released, the myKicks app had been downloaded 60,000 times.

The mobile app, which used augmented reality to test a player’s shooting skills, was so popular that it briefly overtook FIFA’s official World Cup app as the number one sports app in the UK.

“No one really knew if users were going to like this stuff. Whether they could even use the technology and what the reaction would be,” Hall said.

“We believe if we’d had android downloads as well, we’d have had over one million downloads on one week of influencer experiments.”

For Hall, who spent 20 years in the venture capital industry in Australia, the release of the player card will be reward for persevering with the business he helped setup in 2016.

“It really made sense to me that there was going to be this junction point at some stage in the next couple of years where you could do high-grade analytics in the backyard, effectively using just the mobile phone,” he said.

“We spent the first one-and-a-half years developing the core technology. (But) it is pretty crazy technology to try to do on a mobile phone. We honestly nearly died about 20 times from technical problems through that period.

“For us, the validation in what we’re doing is when we talk to these grassroots kids and see their eyes light up. It’s very exciting.”