Post 1: The light-bulb moment, and facing a wall of questions
With the announcement in early April that all future Premier League matches (indeed all football matches and tournaments) have been postponed until further notice, sports fans across the world are surely asking ‘how will we spend our weekends?’ and ‘what can we analyse to the nth degree with friends and strangers?
This was my perception of it anyway. Having been unemployed for several months and upcoming job interviews being cancelled left right and centre, I decided that I could learn valuable web development skills whilst exploring this:
“Coronavirus presents a (literal) once in a lifetime opportunity to fill the void that is left by ‘no new football’. With a little imagination this extends to ‘no new sport’ , ‘limited new film releases’, ‘no chance of going on holiday’ and so on and so forth…”
Slow down Guy, that first problem (football analysis) seemed big enough, lets focus on that.
So I had a look at what was out there to fill the football analysis void- I started with searching “Best all time starting 11” and found lots of articles/ forums/ opinions.
How about “pick the best Premier League team”? Nothing great out there. There are sites that just about do the job- often designed for desktop, or they were missing old-school Premier League legends (David Seaman was my go-to search example) and in some cases they were missing up-to-date players.
But surely there’s something out there? I mean there is an entire podcast series in which Ian Wright and Alan Shearer discuss who they’d pick in their imaginary Premier League greatest team. Why can’t us mere mortals throw our hats in the ring?
To summarise what happened next, I wrote down the questions that needed to be answered before going gung-ho into building a website (not something I’ve ever done before). Included were:
- Why are we so obsessed with analysing a theoretical combination of men to play a game of football?
- How do you fit an 11 player team sheet on a mobile screen along with a way of picking a team?
- How would a user like to share their line up?
- Are substitutes important? What about formations? What’s wrong with a 4–4–2?
I bounced this idea off a group of friends and family and got some lukewarm responses. But one friend agreed it’d be cool to try and build this thing and see if people have fun with it.
Quite quickly we thrashed out what could be called a Product Vision
“I want a website that looks great on my phone, that can put together a lineup with any player that has ever played in the Premier League, that I can easily share with my friends and analyse the heck out of.”
And so it begins, I sign up to Pluralsight — (a library of web development video tutorials) which is free during April and start with the basics.
Join me for the ride as I share my progress and challenges with building this website- Part 2 coming up soon!
