Genk v Liverpool

5 min readOct 26, 2019

8 pm, October 23rd, 2019, in Belgium, 30 miles outside of Brussels and Liverpool look to end a long streak of failed attempts of winning away from home in the Champion’s League.

8 pm, October 23rd, 2019, in Durham, 15 miles outside of Newcastle upon Tyne and Sideline decide to cover the game!

It’s been a busy few months at Sideline with some great meetings with Premier League clubs and continued improvement to the service provision. We have just finished the final touches to our Match Hub, so we wanted to take the app for a spin and see how it performed on an evening when Mo Salah returned to the starting Line Up and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain wanted to show Jurgen Klopp, he is close to being back to his best…

The Match Hub was converted to a PWA last week, so opening up the CMS from the desktop, rather than the browser of my rather hammered MacBook Air was a nice feeling. It was also cool to open it up on the iPad in the second half, as I go bored sat at my desk.

The test was generally a good run, the product works as expected, the content was input into the Match Hub CMS, and was posted to the user devices, which we were running the game for.

Plus Points

Everything works. The testing and refactoring of certain areas have made this a pretty rapid portal to update app content and the content can be updated, deleted, created and read successfully.
Automated, Deep-Linked, Push Notifications fire out when the new content is created and running this alongside Liverpool’s and Genk’s app (both installed on the personal mobile), our push notifications arrived first!!!!!
Flexible Formations for both teams was a real uplift to the platform. Now setting the formations up via the Match Hub & seeing Genk lineup with a 4–4–2 and Liverpool taking up their usual shape of 4–3–3 displayed via the app, brought a smile to my face!
No need for custom graphics for shirts anymore, thanks to targetting SVG elements and new config data, we can let the customers color the shirts for home and away teams themselves!

We thought why are we setting ourselves up to do work? Let the app take care of the Match Hub and let the Match Hub take care of the app!

App Style Settings!!!!! The game-changer. It’s been in a while and customizes the app successfully, and that was really all it was doing. A little idea, could we not send some of the glorious config API data back to the Match Hub and let the user style the Hub themselves? Yes to that! And now, we have a Mobile App and Customer Match Hub CMS, which style themselves.

Minus Points

Archiving the game took a while — 6–8 seconds in timing, which isn’t the best. So some improvement in performance was required. Looking at the code, the several requests required to form the archive section of the app were set as chained manual subscriptions. Thanks to forkJoin, we stacked up the requests, did our magic on response and the archiving is now down to less than 1 second. Faster than the Ox’s first goal!!!

Archiving Games take no time at all now…

The groovy ‘color-your-own shirts’ feature is pretty…groovy? But realizing that some clubs play in white, these shirts disappeared on some sections of the Match Hub. To fix that, we now have darker list backgrounds.

Updating the initial lineups wasn’t so much of a negative, but I think we can add a more streamlined approach to setting the teams up at the beginning. It took around 10 mins per team to set the lineups in action, and seconds to update, when we finally got the official lineups 1 hour before kick-off — changing a few players around, get profile images, etc. The initial set up could be quicker though.

All in all, a decent test run of the shiny new software upgrades and some areas we can now begin to improve. We got some lovely UIs from the test — Genk’s blue gives a nice look to the app, so we have displayed them below to check out.

Have you got a football club you know of that could value some app-love? Get in touch at sales@sidelineapp.io to get our really affordable pricing info.

Thanks for reading along…and a great performance from the Ox to give Kloppo some food for thought when picking his team against Spurs.