The Brief
WanderSport began as a fix for a very ordinary problem: organising weekly football with friends without the usual mess of WhatsApp threads, payment reminders, no-shows, and team debates. The original brief was practical rather than glamorous — make the weekly game easier to run.
What followed was not a one-off prototype, but a product that kept evolving because people genuinely used it. Over time, the app expanded from availability tracking into something much broader: a football operations platform with live weekly utility and a long-term data layer underneath it.
What It Does
At its core, WanderSport handles the weekly logistics of the game: player availability, confirmed and standby lists, payments, reminders, and admin control over who is in, who is out, and when teams are locked.
That foundation then opens into a much deeper product. Teams can be generated and managed with balancing logic, player data flows into an expanding stats engine, and match history is tied to YouTube recordings, weather context, seasonal records, and individual player performance over time.
The result is not just a booking app. It is a system for running regular football properly — from pre-game organisation to post-game analysis.
Technical Depth
WanderSport combines a substantial backend with a mobile-first frontend. It includes authentication, Stripe payments, email and push notifications, admin tooling, a growing player analytics engine, YouTube archive integration, cached metadata, and multi-season match statistics.
The stats layer goes well beyond surface-level totals. Players can be evaluated across goals, assists, passing, defending, shot accuracy, save percentage, form, rankings, and broader ability models. More recent iterations extend that further into fitness and performance inputs, including Strava-linked data and derived indices.
What makes the project especially strong is that these systems are not isolated demos. They are connected parts of one product: weekly operations, historical records, and player analysis all feed the same experience.
Why It Matters
WanderSport is the clearest example of a personal project turning into a genuinely used platform. It has real users, real repeat engagement, real payments, real historical data, and a scope that kept expanding because the underlying product proved useful.
For the portfolio, it demonstrates more than visual polish. It shows product thinking, iteration over time, data modelling, admin workflows, third-party integrations, and the ability to keep a growing system coherent as it becomes more ambitious.
