Research entry
Football Team Tracker — Budget GPS Analytics
2026 · Independent Project
A budget GPS and fitness tracking system for amateur football teams. Django dashboard with Leaflet maps and Chart.js trend charts. ESP32 T-Beam hardware loggers at ~€50/player vs €200–300 for commercial equivalents.
Overview
A full-stack GPS tracking and fitness analytics system for amateur football teams. The commercial alternatives — Catapult, STATSports, Polar Team Pro — cost between €2,000 and €50,000 per team per year. This system costs roughly €100 in hardware for a two-player starter kit, with the Django dashboard already built and running.
The motivation is straightforward: thousands of amateur clubs in Ireland cannot justify professional GPS systems, but want more than a basic phone app with no real hardware and a team dashboard they don’t own.
Hardware
LilyGO T-Beam V1.2 — an ESP32 board with a NEO-M8N GPS module, LoRa radio, OLED display, and an 18650 battery holder, all on one board. Custom firmware (PlatformIO) logs GPS coordinates to a micro SD card as CSV at 1Hz.
Session control is button-driven: press to start, press to stop. LED feedback confirms recording. After training, the SD card CSV is uploaded to the Django dashboard for processing.
Hardware cost per player:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| T-Beam V1.2 (868MHz) | ~€33 |
| 18650 battery | ~€5 |
| Micro SD card + module | ~€8 |
| Total per player | ~€46 |
Dashboard
Built with Django 6 + SQLite (dev) / PostgreSQL (prod), Tailwind CSS, Leaflet.js, and Chart.js.
CSV upload — Haversine distance, sprint detection, high-intensity percentage, and fitness score are all computed on ingest. No manual processing required.
Fitness score algorithm — composite metric weighted across four dimensions:
- Distance (30%) — total metres covered per session
- Sprints (20%) — sprint count above speed threshold
- High-intensity % (20%) — proportion of session above HI threshold
- Consistency (30%) — stability of effort across the session
Session detail — multi-player stats table, Leaflet GPS track overlay, per-player heatmap (leaflet.heat), speed-over-time chart.
Player profiles — Chart.js trend charts for fitness score, distance, and max speed across sessions.
Comparison
| Catapult/STATSports | Polar/GPSports | App-only | This project | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | €10k–50k+ | €2k–5k | €60–180 | ~€120/yr + €46/player HW |
| Real GPS hardware | Yes | Yes | No | Yes (T-Beam) |
| Team dashboard | Full | Good | Basic | Full (Django) |
| Customisable | No | No | No | Fully |
Status
Dashboard built and running locally with 19 passing tests and a sample dataset (4 players, 12 sessions, 185k GPS points). T-Beam hardware units ordered for April 2026. Railway deployment config ready for when hardware is live.