Saga FC: from the spreadsheet to a dedicated app

Alex and Paul have been friends for the better part of 12 years, since the end of high school in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Besides shared passions for music, sports, and good food, a red thread has been the continuous debating and arguing about the impact of technology, research, and, lately, AI to the wider world. Throughout it all, they have always wanted to collaborate on a project together. Whether that is a genuine dream, or just Alex running from his actual job responsibilities, and Paul procrastinating from his PhD is up for debate.

Football was the one subject where their arguing never seemed to find consensus. Paul supports Arsenal F.C., to his own dismay since the time Sébastien Squillaci arrived and being an Arsenal fan stopped being advisable. Alex supports Newcastle United F.C. and MVV Maastricht (2nd league in the Netherlands), a pairing that can best be described as self-inflicted pain. Through college, they played Dutch Sunday-league football at a level best described as ambitious. And while Alex tried to instill his 526 hours of Football Manager tactics on the team, it seemed to no avail.

The endless discussions about football inevitably led to predicting matches, and wanting to one-up one another, to gain eternal bragging rights. To formalize this, Paul built a Google Sheet, which for three seasons carried a small league of friends predicting the Premier League and side-competitions from start to finish. Complicated, convoluted formulas tallied the scores of all participants, but every score had to be inserted by hand for three seasons. As much time was spent predicting, was spent arguing in the group chat. Miraculous predictions that only arrived 40 minutes into the match (blamed on bad wifi); mistakes in the code that led to wrong points and accusations towards Paul cheating the system – it was time for a change. Alex, watching all of this happen, started ruminating about building something better.

That something turned out to be Saga FC – an automated prediction league for you and your friends, which will give you the facts to back up your endless football debates in your group chat.