I have been coming back to Field Eric for something like fourteen or fifteen years, which sounds slightly ridiculous because the thing itself is so simple.
Field Eric is a social football app for people who organize casual matches and need a few more players, and for players who would happily join a game if they knew one was happening. Someone has booked a pitch. The match is tonight. They are three players short. A few WhatsApp groups get messaged. Someone asks a cousin. Someone says "I'll let you know" and then disappears. At some point, the organizer either finds enough people or the match becomes awkward.
This is not a world-changing problem. It is not trying to be. But it is a real problem, and I have always liked software that starts there.
The match that stuck
Field Eric originally came out of conversations with friends while I was living in London in 2012. The detail that stayed with me was Kros’ Monday morning panic to find players for the weekly Għ. F. Fondgħadir match back in Malta. It sounded funny at first, but the problem was real and familiar: someone had a pitch, a time, and a few players missing.
That ordinary problem is what stayed with me.
We tried building Field Eric back then, in the era when every small web app seemed to involve Facebook login, Rails, and a lot of optimism. It had some nice ideas. It also had the usual problems of side projects: too much scope, not enough time, and a product that was probably trying to be too many things before it had proved it could do one thing well.
Why it kept coming back
Over the years, through moving countries, changing jobs, and watching the web change around it, the idea kept coming back. Part of the reason is that it still feels useful. Casual football has not gone away. The tools around it are still messy. WhatsApp groups are great until they are not. Facebook groups are useful, but they are not built around the actual flow of organizing a match. A person looking for a game and a person short of players should be easier to connect.
So I started rebuilding it.
Starting smaller this time
The current version of Field Eric is intentionally small. An organizer can create a match. Players can see upcoming matches and ask to join. The organizer can manage requests. The first version is aimed at Malta, because that is where the original problem came from, and because Malta is small enough that something like this could actually find its first community.
The ambition, though, is not limited to Malta. The same problem exists anywhere people play casual football. It could be five-a-side in Sliema, seven-a-side in London, or a Sunday game somewhere else entirely. If the core loop works, the geography can change later.
What AI changed
Rebuilding it this time also felt different from the first attempt, mostly because the tools are different now. I do not think this version would exist without AI. Not because AI "built it for me." That is not what happened, and I do not find that framing especially useful. Software still needs taste. It needs decisions. It needs someone to care about what should be included, what should be left out, and what the thing is actually for.
But AI has changed the distance between idea and product.
You no longer need to be excellent at every layer of the stack at the same time. You do not have to be a backend specialist, database designer, DevOps engineer, frontend developer, UI designer, copywriter, tester, and product manager before you can make meaningful progress. You still need to understand enough to make good calls, and you still need to do the work. But the work moves faster.
For a side project like Field Eric, that matters. It means an idea that used to stay in a notebook, or in an old repository, or in a conversation with friends, can become something testable. Not perfect. Not finished. But real enough to put in front of people.
That is where Field Eric is now. I am hoping to launch soon, and I am starting by testing it with organizers in Malta. The goal is not to arrive with a grand platform and expect people to care. The goal is to find a few people who already organize casual football, understand how they do it, and see whether Field Eric can make one part of that job easier.
If you know someone who organizes casual football in Malta, please send them to Field Eric. And if you are based in Malta and would like to help seed it locally, test it with real organizers, or just tell me why it will or will not work, I would love to hear from you.
Small software. Clear job. Help a match happen.