To every team manager with a poor sense of reading a football game, it sound like a great idea: touch some few keys on your i-pad2 or T-pad and get your installed software application to analyze the on-going football game and go ahead to proffer a counter-tactics that will help you win the game. Or if you want to check a star player like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Xavi Fernandez, Wayne Rooney… you can purchase the player’s recipe online and let the application show you how you can possibly curb the player’s performance against your team. Moreover, the software describes and analyze the coaching style and tactics of prominent managers like Jose Mourniho’s 4-4-2 diamond, Arsene Wenger’s tip-tap, or Sir Alex Ferguson’s quantum playing style… Does this technology already exist or is it on the drawing board? Well, I’m describing for you the new ‘Soccer Master.’
Soccer Master is a smart mobile software application that promises to revolutionize the way the game of football is played, especially the changes it will bring to the job of a team manager. The idea itself is an out-of-the-box thinking. It’s not another ‘Soccer Manager’ or a play-station for computer games, rather it’s an advance programming of the most recent technology. Maybe, I’m letting the cat out of the bag for this two young programmers, Felix Okere and Sesan Balogun, that has been on this project for 3 years now. They have been working together in their closet in Lagos Nigeria, but are now ready to launch the software into the market. Well, their work has already got the attention of Obinna Anusiem, CEO, Nigeria Exchange Dot Com (www.ngex.com) and he is already taken the project to the United States to get Benchmark Capital (Venture Capitalist firm) to invest on the start-up. According to Sesan Balogun, “Obi is looking at other options too. He will be meeting with management of oracle.com to see how the application will be co-branded with the i-pad2.
The software is designed in such a way that it’ll be re-activated each new football season, immediately after the close of the transfer market window. It updates the team list of each club in over 100 leagues across the world. Perhaps, the most prominent is the English Premier League, Spanish La’ liga, Italian Seria ‘A, German League and French League. It also considers the manager of each team and automatically design possible pattern each team may adopt that year. However, with your manual input of how players are positioned in the pitch, the software analyses it and show you how the team may likely play. It also shows you the counter tactics you may adopt to stall the opponent game plan.
It sounds so great, but software like this is usually complicated and sometimes confusing – with lots of quality problems. For instance, although Soccer Master may assist managers in numerous ways, its proffered tactics may not always work or lead to managers winning their games. This is because there are other factors that inter-play in every football game. Football players are not machine and cannot play at their optimal level at all times, even star players do have off-days. Factors such as weather condition during the game, players and team level of motivation, the way referee decides to officiate the game, are some of the things that makes a football game unpredictable. This suggests that Soccer Master software application may have some limitations even from the onset.
