I have been coming back to Field Eric for something like fourteen or fifteen years, which sounds slightly ridiculous because the idea behind it is so simple.

It originally came out of conversations with friends while I was living in London in 2011. The detail that stuck with me was Kros’ Monday morning panic to find enough players for the weekly Għ. F. Fondgħadir match back in Malta. Someone had booked a pitch, the match was happening that evening, and they were usually a few players short.

Then came the usual scramble: a few WhatsApp messages, someone asking a cousin, someone else saying “I’ll let you know” and then disappearing. Eventually they either found enough people or played with whoever turned up.

The obvious idea was to make it easier for the person organising the match to find people who wanted to play.

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. We built some of it, had far too many ideas for what it might eventually become and, like a huge number of side projects, never quite finished it.

The annoying thing was that the idea never really went away.

I moved countries, changed jobs and worked on plenty of other things, but every so often Field Eric would come back. The problem hadn't disappeared either. People were still organising matches through WhatsApp and Facebook, still trying to work out who was actually coming and still looking for one or two extra players at the last minute.

So eventually I opened the idea again.

This time I deliberately started smaller. An organiser can create a match, say where and when it is happening and how many players are needed. Players can find upcoming matches and join them. The organiser can see who is coming and keep track of the numbers without having to reconstruct the entire match from a WhatsApp thread.

The first version is focused on Malta, partly because that is where the original idea came from and partly because Malta is small enough that a product like this has a reasonable chance of finding its first group of people.

Rebuilding it this time was also very different because the tools had changed.

I don't think this version of Field Eric would exist without AI. Not because AI built it for me, but because it removed enough friction for a side project to keep moving. There were still plenty of decisions to make, plenty of code to understand and plenty of occasions where something that looked straightforward turned into an evening of figuring out why it wasn't.

Someone recently asked me how long a list of bug fixes and feature requests would have taken me without AI. It is a fair question, but I think it slightly misses the point. The more important question is not whether a full Saturday of work would otherwise have taken two weekends, or a month, or longer. The important thing is that it happened at all.

Field Eric sat unfinished in various forms for about fourteen years. With AI in the loop, it became a working MVP in about two months. Not because the hard parts disappeared, but because the friction got low enough that momentum survived.

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.

It also made it much easier to keep the scope under control. Instead of trying to build everything Field Eric might one day become, I could keep asking a much simpler question: what does the person organising a football match actually need right now? Mostly, they need enough players.

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 organisers 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 organise 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 organises 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 organisers, 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.