Overview
Having taken a fairly long break from working on football projects, I was inspired by the new A-League Women season that will kick off in late October 2025 (at the time of writing) and the league’s inclusion in the latest Football Manager installment. As a bid to learn more about the league, the clubs, and the players ahead of the new season, I returned to Streamlit with a new perspective and new knowledge learned to create a recruitment dashboard, inspired by Football Manager’s functionalities.
Functionalities
- In a hypothetical world with a data-driven club, most of the decision-making process is driven by data, thus there is a need for the data to be available and accessible at key decision-makers’ fingertips. The dashboard addresses most of that concern, thanks to Streamlit Cloud’s infrastructure for hosting the dashboard and the data being stored on the cloud, allowing for immediate access and request from the dashboard.
- Streamlit also supports responsiveness, which allows the dashboard to be viewed on-the-go and during important moments where data can be used to support and present to relevant stakeholders such as coaches, sporting directors, head of recruitment, etc.
- The dashboard can also be used by the players, encouraging them to take more ownership of their data while also educating them on their own performance data that can be beneficial for their development and improvement on the pitch, which was inspired by Vosse de Boode’s approach for Ajax Amsterdam.
- In contrast to previous Streamlit dashboards that I made, this dashboard prioritises visualisations interactivity, which makes the dashboard feels more modern and allows for more data to be viewed, in contrast to serving static Matplotlib visualisations on the front-end.
- That does not mean Matplotlib visualisations are not used here, however, as the dashboard still allows the user to save visualisations created on the front-end by mirroring Plotly’s visualisations as closest as possible.
Limitations
Since this was meant to be a one-off project, there were features and functionalities that had to be left off due to time and resource limitation. However, I hope that the dashboard serves as a foundation for better ideas with more time and resources, either by football organisations or sport technology-focused companies.
View the app and the code repository here!
Daryl Dao 