LocalTeams Mission Statement

Today, LocalTeams is declaring war on for-profit, casual team sports apps currently on the rise in Dublin. In this first blog post, we’ll limit our criticism to the big players: GoodRec, Meetup.com and Athletizer, but with the wide availability of vibe coding tools, we expect to see more and more for-profit apps that are designed to extract massive margins from unsuspecting casual sports players.

Here’s the short version: nobody needs to be paying 9 or 11 euro to play a game of 6 or 7-a-side football in Dublin city. If that was the actual price per head for booking facilities, then sports centres would be tearing up their padel courts to make way for football pitches. But the reality is that pitch booking is very cheap in this country.

An hour of 6 or 7-a-side football in Sportsco (Dublin 4), Portmarnock Sports and Leisure (Fingal) or Naas sports centre costs €60 total, which is 4 to 5 euro per head. Bear that in mind for a moment when I introduce this next bit of information: The standard price for a one hour game of football organised on GoodRec is €11 per head (excluding card fees).

When you pay GoodRec €11, or “€10.99” as they like to put it, €5 goes to the facility, and €6 goes to GoodRec. GoodRec employs “hosts” to organise their games. Here’s a recent job listing for this sort of role. The GoodRec team mention that a successful candidate should have “a vibrant, engaging personality”, “[ability] to arrive early and lead our games”, among other qualities.

Sounds good. So what does this role pay? In GoodRec’s words: “Hosts play [the game] for free.” Given that the market price of one space on an football pitch is 4 to 5 euro, GoodRec essentially pays their hosts the value of 4 to 5 euro per game. So let’s do the maths: generally, games are 12 players, 11 of whom pay €11. That’s €121 in revenue, minus €60 for the facility, which is a massive profit margin. Another Dublin-based competitor, Athletizer, charges €8.50 per head, which is a bit better, but still enormously greedy.

The last case study: games that are broadly advertised on meetup.com. Groups there usually play one game per week, so they pay about €259 per month for facilities. However, to cover the cost of the meetup.com monthly fee, they are forced to charge players upwards of €7.

So let’s compare all of these profit margins to other famously profitable industries:

It’s kind of maddening.

GoodRec’s website implores you to “join the GoodRec family”. Here’s their longer pitch:

“Our hope is that GoodRec brings people together. We love hearing that best friends have met, relationships have started, and group chats have been born through these games. We’re excited to have you join us.”

Sure. I suppose it can be exciting, perhaps even thrilling, to make 50% profit margin off human connections that might have formed anyway without your app.

The Athletizer owners refer to themselves on their website as “Dublin’s pickup football community.” If this app is truly synonymous with the entire Dublin pickup football community, then that community is slowly becoming owned by a for-profit company that is taking 41% of the money that players pay.

These are basically the dating apps of the pickup football world. Their interest in forming communities, linking people together, and all that… it stops the moment that community comes together and decides: to hell with GoodRec/Athletizer, let’s just organise our own games.

That’s where LocalTeams comes into the picture. We are a non-profit, free and open-source platform for organising casual team sports. We’ll give your group the tools you need to organise, advertise and track your games, and we’ll never take a cut of the money players pay for games. We won’t even take transaction fees.

First off, we need to get the word out. We need to let people know that there is a better way to organise casual team sports in Dublin. Let people know that they can organise their own games, and that they don’t need to pay GoodRec, Athletizer or meetup.com to do it.

How we plan to sustain LocalTeams

Usually marketplace-style apps sustain themselves by taking a cut of the money that users pay to third parties, but LocalTeams is a non-profit, so how does that work? First off, we keep things incredibly lean.

Minimal staff:

• Seán Healy (founder) - full-time
• Advertising and marketing: 100% word-of-mouth. We don’t need to price games down by a measly cent to make things look cheaper; we are the most cost-effective platform, period. We’ll never implore you to pose for a awkward team photo after each game for the socials; we market ourselves by adding the features you want the most, and then we let word spread.
• We leverage the open-source community for development, privacy/security auditing and feature requests.
• A group of early-adopters receive new features first, and provide feedback, bug reports and suggestions.
• No C-suite bonuses.

Donations: Completely optional.

Grants

We routinely apply for non-profit grants. Most recently we applied to the EU’s NGI fediversity fund.

Sponsorships

Cost is a barrier-to-entry for participation in casual team sports in Dublin: visit any sports centre on any given evening, and you’ll notice a number of pitches lie empty and unbooked. By decreasing the bottom line for players, LocalTeams will increase pitch bookings for sports centres, raising their margins, and perhaps offsetting costly plans to replace all-weather pitches with more easily monetisable padel courts. In exchange, we will seek sponsorship from sports centres. This still falls within non-profit principles given that most Dublin football centres are publicly funded or non-profit themselves. We will publicise our financial records whenever they change. It’s time for the organisational tools that feed revenue into these non-profit centres to also become non-profit.

Technical support contracts

For casual sports groups who would like to self-host their own LocalTeams instance, we offer technical support contracts at a modest monthly rate. We don’t put any limitations or tiers on the software we give you. Everyone gets the same experience, but those with the technical support contract get an EULA guaranteeing our guidance and support for any issues that arise. Self-hosting is a great option for groups who want to keep their data private, e.g. if they have players under the age of 18 in their group, or if they are a corporate club.

Managed hosting contracts

For those who don’t want to self-host, or who find the technical support contract too costly, we offer managed hosting contracts at a monthly fee of €8 per club. That includes no limits on group size, number of games or any functionality. All groups are treated equally.

Bypassing card fees

Rather than relying on payment procesors like Stripe, players are encouraged to pay their group admin directly. Their balance is then updated through LocalTeams’ automated bank statement reconciliation system. This is a win-win for both players and admins: players avoid card fees, and admins avoid the hassle of reconciling payments within an app or spreadsheet. They just export their bank statement every once in a while, upload it, and LocalTeams automatically updates the balances of all players in the group.

Why we think LocalTeams will succeed

The non-profit model gives us freedom other apps lack. While a for-profit app needs to justify every feature in terms of revenue generation, LocalTeams can focus on the features that players want and need the most. Over time, this genuinely user-centric principle will compound into a better product experience overall. We are already the only team sport app on the market that supports:

• Zero card fees (pay after you play, i.e. the traditional way); we provide a full double entry accounting system that is automatically filled via bank statement reconciliation.
• Automated team selection based on predicted player skill and position.
  • Designed and built by a former PhD candidate with research experience in optimisation and fair resource allocation.
  • No more random team nonsense.
• More nuanced group rules
  • ‘Regular’ players get priority.
  • Unpaid members get placed on the waitlist.
  • More realistic game signup options, e.g. “I can only play if we reach 14 players (fitness issue)”, “I’m willing to play if numbers are low (substitute)”, “I can only play in goals (injured)”
  • All customisable.
• Iron-clad child accounts, for parents who want to bring their teenager along to a game.
• Web presence: we do have an app for all the mobile platforms, but the difference is that LocalTeams doesn’t lock your sports group inside of it. With our SEO settings page, you’ll be able to get your group onto the first page of Google search results.
• Zero signup: admins can whitelist phone numbers, allowing players in their group to sign up to individual games via an invite link. It’s not a profit-maker to allow users to engage with the app without providing personal data in exchange, so good thing we are non-profit.

There’s a reason organisations like Wikipedia, WordPress and Mozilla have thrived for decades: they create immense value for people, outside the constraints of profit and shareholder value. With your help, we hope LocalTeams can become a part of internet history as well.