Fans have been running the American football team through the app for a year now.

Фото: Depositphotos

17 Jun professional football team Salt lake screaming eagles completed her first season in history.

The whole year the club was managed by sports managers and trainers, but by users with smartphones who use the application took all key decisions: from the logo and form to the combination in the last seconds of an important match, writes the publication TJ.

Several thousand "virtual coaches" from different parts of the world eventually led the club to seventh place in the championship. Now the creators of the team dream of their own league, where users of the application manage these teams.

The idea of ​​creating the application came up with Sohrob Furudi from Texas. As a child, he watched the games of his favorite team with his brothers every Sunday, shouting at the TV and criticizing the coaching decisions that he considered wrong. In 2015, he came across an old article The New York Times about the project Project franchiseallowing fans to jointly manage a small baseball team. The author of the idea, Grant Cohen, was even going to purchase a professional club to implement the application, but at the last moment did not want to get into debt. Immediately after reading the article, Farady found Cohen's contacts, and a few hours later they met in Los Angeles and agreed to make the project a reality.

Partners brought in the project of the former NFL player Ray Austin and several entrepreneurs with technology startups. Together they called Project fanchise and in 2016, they acquired a professional team participating in the championship Indoor football league.

The creators of the project had no experience in managing this club, but they simply relied on the votes of the fans, who chose everything: from the name to the players.

In the summer of 2016, Faroudi and Cohen launched the application, with which the owner-fans had to make the first important decisions. At first they were offered two American cities, in one of which the team would host home games. Most chose Salt Lake City, Utah.

After that, the fans called the new club "Screaming Eagles."

To prevent the project from falling prey to trolls, the founders of Project FANchise divided fans into categories. All users perform small everyday tasks in the life of the club and earn special points. So novices do not get access to important decisions, and "advanced" fans with a large number of points can communicate with the management and players personally.

For those who wanted to "jump over" several steps and take important posts in the team, Farudi launched a crowdfunding campaign. With its help, the club received 60 thousand dollars, and some users became scouts, managers and assistant coaches.

Using the app, fans chose a logo, a form design, a name for a support group, and even music played before matches (song Ruff Ryders' Anthem rapper dmx).

Voting fans chose the head coach based on several live interviews on YouTube. The users liked William McCarthy's expressive demeanor, but after a few months they also dismissed him because of "philosophical differences."

Even before the first match in the history of the team, the application brought together thousands of American football fans from dozens of countries around the world, including Australia, Finland and Kenya, far from the US and American football.

In the first month, the team had more than 40 thousands of “coaches” who were ready to try out the main feature of the project - managing the club directly during matches.

The main difference between American football and many other team sports is the dynamics of the game. In hockey or regular football, teams can intercept the initiative, keep the ball in their hands or carry out several attacks in a row at once. Here, each match consists of short individual draws, between which there are large pauses on vacation or advertising.

With the help of the application, all the fans of the club got the opportunity to choose tactics during these stops: they can make players pass the ball more often or vice versa take the ball and go "ahead". The combination, which won the voting of the fans, is already in a few seconds brought to life by the players.

His first match in the professional league "Eagles" have played in February 2017 of the year - and immediately lost with a crushing score. The players noted that the match was “very strange” because they did not know what to expect from the “virtual coaches”. As a result, the fans made several erroneous decisions, but they could not even blame the players for everything: they also chose them themselves.

The players after the match admitted that they felt like video game characters.

Over time, users of the application have learned to act together with the team: "Screaming Eagles" have become one of the most spectacular and attacking teams of the League. In one of the matches, the combination chosen by the vote brought the club victory in the last seconds. However, in the first tournament of 16 matches, Salt Lake City won only five.

The “Screaming Eagles” season, under the control of the users, was the first step of the plan of Faroudi and Cohen. Their dream remains the whole Interactive Football League: a championship where fans will be able to decide for all teams of the tournament and compete with each other. The creators of the project acquired another football team called Colorado Crash. In April, 2017, the clubs played the first professional match in history, in which, instead of two coaches, key decisions were made by fans.

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