Mark Hay
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Live Product·2025·Live product

Match Tally

A mobile-first football admin tool built for the conditions you actually use it in — pitch-side, before kick-off, on a phone. Tracks fixtures, opponents, and season stats without the bloat of club management platforms.

Open Match Tally
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Match Tally team dashboard

The problem

Amateur football managers have a straightforward admin problem: tracking opponents, recording results, and keeping a coherent picture of the season. The tools available are either overbuilt — full club management platforms designed for paid clubs with secretaries and committee structures — or they are spreadsheets that do not survive contact with an actual match day.

The real issue is context. Match admin needs to happen at the wrong time and in the wrong place: on a touchline, before kick-off, on a phone, with one hand. Software that was never designed for those conditions becomes a burden rather than a tool, and gets abandoned for a WhatsApp message and a mental note that does not get written down.

What it does

  • Team setup with roster, shared access via team code, and clean first-run flow
  • Opponent management so you can track history against specific clubs over a season
  • Match start and live tally workflow built for pitch-side use on a phone
  • Results logging and season stats that persist across games without manual aggregation
  • Fast enough to use before, during, and after matches without getting in the way

From the product

Match Tally new team setup
Match Tally mobile stats view

Product choices

Where the product decisions came from and why the scope stayed narrow.

01

Designed for the wrong moment

Most admin happens on a desktop in a quiet room. Match tracking happens on a wet touchline with gloves on. The entire interface is built around that — large tap targets, minimal typing, one-action flows.

02

No feature creep allowed

There's a long list of things Match Tally could do: player ratings, training schedules, league tables, contact management. None of them are in it. The scope is deliberate — doing the core thing well is worth more than doing ten things adequately.

03

Shared access without complexity

Team code sharing means a manager and an assistant or second coach can both access the same team without requiring an admin panel, user management, or invitation flows. Simple by design.

04

Stats as a by-product

Season stats are the reward for consistent match logging, not a separate task. If you use the product for what it does, the season picture builds automatically — wins, losses, goals, opponents, patterns.

What was left out — and why

These are features that get requested for tools like this. Each was considered and set aside.

No player ratingsRating players after a match is a feature that sounds useful until you consider who's actually using it — a volunteer manager on a Sunday morning, not a professional scout. It adds sensitive social complexity with limited operational value.
No training managementTraining schedules, attendance, and drill planning are legitimate problems, but they belong to a different workflow and a different use context. Adding them would pull Match Tally away from the match-day focus that makes it worth using.
No league table integrationPulling in external league data requires API agreements, maintenance, and dependency on third parties. For a tool built around what one manager can control, it creates fragility for marginal value.
No communications layerTeam messaging, availability polling, and contact management are all solved by the tools teams already use. Building a parallel communications layer would add complexity while competing with WhatsApp groups that are not going to go away.

What worked

  • The pitch-side-first framing gave the product a clear identity and justified every scope decision
  • Team code sharing solved a real access problem without building a user management system
  • Stats building automatically from match logs means people get value without extra effort
  • The mobile-first flow holds up well under the conditions it was built for

What I'd improve next

  • Smoother multi-team support for managers running more than one squad
  • Stronger reporting: goal scorers, clean sheets, performance trends across a season
  • More polished editing flows for fixing entries after the fact
  • Continued refinement of the match-start and tally interaction under pressure

Open Match Tally

Match Tally is live. Set up a team and start tracking your season.

Open Match Tally

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