Professional football analytics runs on positional data — who is where, moving how fast, how often. The systems that produce it usually involve stadium installations, multiple synchronized cameras or wearables on every player. We asked a simpler question: what could we get from one normal camera feed of a match?
The constraint was the point
Grassroots clubs, academies and lower leagues will never install stadium hardware. If useful tracking only works with a fortune in equipment, most of football simply goes without. Building against a single-camera constraint forced every idea to justify itself on accessible footage — the kind any club can record today.
The result is a suite that watches a match feed and produces a live tactical picture: every player identified, speeds estimated, movement trails drawn, possession tracked, all mirrored onto a top-down minimap while the game happens. No wearables, no installation, no second camera.
What surprised us
The hardest problems weren't the glamorous ones. Crowded goal-mouths, players crossing paths, broadcast cuts — the messy reality of football footage taught us more than any clean benchmark. Every fix that survived contact with a real match made the whole system meaningfully better, and none of them came from a paper.
The broader lesson applies well beyond sport: when you design for the cheapest realistic input instead of the ideal one, you build something the whole market can actually use. The expensive version becomes a luxury, not a requirement.