football-manager — a full-stack FastHTML app for managing amateur football rosters

[Redevil10]

Hi everyone 👋

I built a web app using FastHTML + SQLite for managing amateur football (soccer) teams — player management, auto-balanced team allocation, match tracking, and more.

🔗 Repo: https://github.com/Redevil10/football-manager 🎮 Live Demo: https://redevil10-football-manager.hf.space/ (click "Try as Guest" to explore)

What it does

I play weekly football with friends and we always had the same problem: picking fair teams. So I built this to solve it properly.

I'm also a huge fan of Sports Interactive's Football Manager — been playing it for years. The 41 player attributes (Technical, Mental, Physical, Goalkeeper) are inspired by the game as a tribute. If you've ever scouted a wonderkid and obsessed over their attribute spread, you'll feel right at home 😄 (Fair warning though — my rating algorithm is pretty basic compared to FM's engine. No hidden attributes or match engine here, just a straightforward score to help balance teams!)

• Player Management — add/edit players with 41 skill attributes across Technical, Mental, Physical, and Goalkeeper categories (FM fans will recognise these!), each rated to produce an overall score
• Auto Team Allocation — players are sorted by overall score and distributed across teams to minimise the gap between team totals
• Match Tracking — create matches, import signups, record goals/assists/events
• Leagues & Clubs — multi-club support with role-based access (viewer/manager/admin)
• Smart Import — optional AI-powered signup parsing via Gemini API (paste a messy WeChat/WhatsApp signup chain message and it extracts player names)

How I found FastHTML

I've been a fan of Jeremy Howard's work for years, ever since I stumbled on the Practical Deep Learning course. I couldn't believe it was free — and the quality was incredible. What I love most is how Jeremy explains things from the root, not just the hype: understanding how things actually work, walking through the thought process, teaching how to use tools properly, or even building his own tools when existing ones fall short. As a software developer, I always feel like there's so much to learn, and the way Jeremy teaches is the most effective way I've found to pick up new things — all the way through to the recent How To Solve It With Code course. That's how I ended up discovering FastHTML and building this project.

Why FastHTML

Coming from a backend/data engineering background (Python, PostgreSQL, Airflow), I wanted to build a proper web app without learning React or a heavy frontend framework. FastHTML was perfect for this — I could stay in Python and use HTMX for interactivity. Some things I particularly liked:

• HTMX integration feels natural — partial page updates for things like editing a player inline or drag-and-drop reordering just work with hx-post / hx-swap
• SQLite as the database — zero infrastructure, and it's more than enough for this use case
• Python all the way down — routing, rendering, logic, all in one language

Tech stack

Layer	Technology
Backend	FastHTML (Python 3.13)
Database	SQLite + auto-backup to HF Datasets
Frontend	HTML + HTMX
Deployment	Docker on Hugging Face Spaces
Package Manager	uv

What's next

There's plenty I want to improve:

• Better UI — the current interface is functional but not very polished or modern-looking. This is probably the area that needs the most work
• More tactical formations — right now team allocation is score-based, but I'd like managers to be able to choose their own formations and assign players to specific positions
• Stats dashboards — as more match data accumulates, I want to build dashboards for things like leading scorers, top assists, player form over time, etc.

Try it out!

The app supports multi-tenancy, so if you also manage an amateur football team and want to give it a go, feel free to get in touch — I'm happy to set up an account for you. You can use it to manage your team across a whole league season, tracking match data game by game.

Feedback welcome!

I'm relatively new to web development and this is one of my first full-stack projects. If anything looks off — whether it's the code structure, how I'm using FastHTML patterns, HTMX approach, or anything else — I'd love to hear about it. Always looking to improve!