My buddy Tom Bogert has a story that’s become a legend in our soccer writer groupchat.
He was a talented player as a teenager, good enough to participate in some fancy tournament where his team was coached by a U.S. Men’s National Team veteran you’ve probably heard of. But there were other squads there from elite academies like River Plate, and Tom quickly found out the hard way that there are levels to being good at this sport.
After a disastrous first half against some blue-chip prospects, the ex-USMNT guy huddled his team together and talked through the plan to turn the game around. Then he turned and spoke to one kid in particular.
“Hey Tom,” he said. “Do you think maybe you could try completing a fucking pass out there?”1
I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately, because — if you’ll forgive a little LinkedIn posting here — it’s exactly what building a startup feels like. No matter how talented you think you are, starting a business will hit you with challenges you never saw coming. You’ll spend a lot of days excited about this thing you’re trying to bring into the world. You’ll spend a lot of others feeling like you can’t complete a fucking pass.
Last summer I wrote to you guys about futi, the startup I’ve been working on since I left The Athletic. The idea is simple: pro analytics for fans. We’re putting machine learning models like the ones my co-founder Mike Imburgio builds for clubs and the data visuals you know from my journalism into an app that looks and feels like whatever you already use to check scores. For fans who like using data to understand the game better — which increasingly seems to be pretty much everyone — it just makes sense.
The response to that first email blew me and Mike away. In one weekend, without any kind of product demo or even a website, we had over 2,300 people on the waitlist and thousands more following the company on social media or Discord. Clearly the idea of better public soccer data was something a lot of people could get excited about. Now we just had to make it real.
For the last few months, like most early-stage startups, we’ve had a lot of incomplete passes. Our date for user testing has been pushed back a couple times, which has been frustrating. During the MLS season I used some cool new futi models to tell stories for The Guardian about Minnesota United’s set piece sickos and San Diego’s buildup obsession, but whenever people asked when they could get their hands on the data, all I could say was “soon.”
Today, finally, I’ve got good news: you’re about to start seeing a lot more from futi.
We’re not quite ready to send out app invites yet, but there are a bunch of stats and visuals to introduce you to before launch, and we want you to be able to dig into the data and tell stories of your own. So starting this week, we’re going to be publishing model explainers at a regular clip from futi’s newsletter and giving you early access to advanced data from the 2025 MLS season to fuel preseason takes. We’ll also be posting videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube — yes, my 40-year-old ass is pivoting to short-form video — so go follow us there too if you’re into that.
We hope you’ll share your thoughts on the data as it’s released so we can think about how to make this stuff more useful for you. The best way to do that is probably by chatting with us in futi’s Discord, but feel free to @ us on Bluesky if you do any posts with futi data so we can share them with people. Mike and I both started as fan bloggers and we’d genuinely love to see futi inspire more stuff like that.
If you podcast or write about soccer, Mike and I will be saying yes to as many guest spots and interviews as we can in the near future to get the word out about futi. We can go deep on analytics nerd stuff or just chat about what the data says about your favorite MLS team. The best part of our job is when we get to shoot the shit about soccer and call it work, so please give us more excuses to do that.
Here are all the places you can follow futi as we start to roll stuff out this week:
We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on with you. Now let’s get out there and complete some fucking passes.
Tom would like readers to know that he was not the only kid who got deservedly reamed in that halftime talk. And after watching him ball out in a media pickup game at last summer’s MLS All-Star Game, I have terrible news for the groupchat: he’s actually pretty good. I think I even saw him complete a pass.
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