Why we started writing about our kids' football seasons (and what changed).
Three years ago, in the spring of 2023, one of us tried to find a photo of his daughter's first proper football goal. She'd scored it the previous season. He remembered roughly when. He went into the Photos app on his phone, searched March 2022 to May 2022. There were 8,300 photos in that window.
He scrolled for an hour and a half. He couldn't find it.
She came in halfway through and asked what he was looking for. "The goal," he said. "You know, the first one." She didn't quite remember it. He didn't either, in the specific way he wanted to. They both agreed it had probably been important.
That was the moment that made us start building.
The thing nobody tells you about phone photos
Modern parents take an extraordinary number of photos. The average parent of two kids in primary school has somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 photos on their phone. You don't notice this until you go looking for one specific one.
The photo is in there. But finding it requires:
- Remembering roughly when
- Scrolling through hundreds of unrelated photos from the same period
- Recognising the one you want from a thumbnail
- Often finding it's blurry, or that you took the photo of the wrong kid
And here's the painful part: the photo, even when found, isn't the memory you wanted. The memory you wanted was the photo plus context. What match it was. What the score was. What happened in the goal. Where your kid was on the pitch. Whether they celebrated. What you said in the car on the way home. The photo alone is a fragment.
We started realising the same thing was true for every important moment in our kids' football lives. We'd been there for all of it. We had photos of most of it. But we couldn't reconstruct it.
What we tried first (which didn't work)
The obvious move: start a Notes file. One per kid. Add a section per match.
This worked for about six weeks. Then the matches started blurring. The Notes file became a wall of text. Photos weren't in it — they were still in the camera roll. Search worked but only if you'd been consistent about formatting, which we hadn't.
By the end of the season we had a half-completed Notes file and no real archive. The seasons were still slipping through our fingers, but now we'd added a small amount of guilt about it.
Why we built something specific
What we wanted, when we sat down to figure it out, was three things:
- One place where every match goes. Date, opposition, score, position, our kid's goals + assists, one sentence about the moment, one photo. Structured so April-us doesn't curse February-us for inconsistent entries.
- A season-level view that emerges automatically. The total goals. The form line. The position breakdown. The album of season photos. Something that looks like an artefact, not a database dump.
- The ability to share with grandparents. Specifically with one set of grandparents who'd asked, repeatedly, why they didn't see more of the matches.
We looked at the apps that existed. Most were either coach-focused (squad management, training drills) or were generic sports trackers (steps, runs). None of them were built for the parent's specific question: "what happened in my kid's season?".
So we started building one.
What surprised us along the way
The magazine framing changed everything
Early versions of MFJ were utilitarian. A list of matches. Some stats. It worked but it didn't feel like much. Then we tried treating each match as a magazine cover — big photo, cover line, headline stats, achievements as stickers — and the entire feel of the app shifted. The data was the same. The emotional weight was different.
The lesson: there's a difference between recording your kid's season and commemorating it. Almost nobody wants to maintain a spreadsheet of their kid's football. Many parents want a magazine they get to be the editor of.
The 5-minute rule turned out to be the whole thing
We built an early version that asked for ~15 minutes of data entry per match. Detail-rich, beautiful, completely abandoned by users within six weeks. We rebuilt around the 5-minute Saturday routine and habit-completion rates jumped.
The lesson: any tool that asks for more than 5 minutes per session, from parents on a Saturday, is competing with the actual life those parents have. We're not.
The cover line is the most-loved feature, by a mile
We didn't expect this. We added an AI-generated magazine cover line on every match because it felt fun. Parents emailed us about it more than any other feature. The cover line — a 2-5 word headline like "LATE WINNER" or "FIRST-HALF FLOURISH" — turns out to be the thing that makes a match feel like an event.
The lesson: the small surprises matter more than the big features. The reason parents come back to MFJ on a Sunday morning is to see what the app called yesterday's match.
What we learned about football and memory
The bigger thing that's emerged across building this is a clearer view of how parents and kids hold sport memories differently.
Kids remember the moments and forget the surrounding facts. Parents remember the structure (results, who you played, league position) and forget the moments. Neither is enough on its own. The keepsake that ages best is the one that captures both — the moment in the kid's voice, plus the structure in the parent's.
This is the bit we're proudest of. MFJ asks for both. The seven boring facts (date, opposition, score, position, minutes, goals, assists). Plus the one moment described in plain language. That combination is what makes the archive feel like a real artefact at the end of a season — something a kid will actually want to read at 18.
The wider product family
While building MFJ we kept hearing the same frustration from coaches and club admins. Different people, different roles, same problem: nothing was built for them.
That's how KiCKS (the coaching app) and GrassrootsFC (the club admin platform) came to exist. Same team, same view of grassroots football — just three angles on the same Saturday morning. Parent, coach, club. All running on the same human in the same fleece, freezing on the same pitch.
The thing we wish someone had told us
Your kid is going to play football for a few years. Maybe seven, maybe ten. They'll play roughly 25–40 matches per season. That's 200–300 matches across a childhood. Each one is small. Together they're enormous.
Almost nobody captures them. The default state of grassroots football memory is loss — a season ends, the kit goes in the wash, the photos sit in the camera roll, and three years later the parent goes looking and finds nothing.
It doesn't have to be that way. Five minutes a Saturday is genuinely all it takes. Whatever tool you use — ours, a notebook, a Notes file — the act of writing it down is what changes the relationship between you and the season.
We built MFJ because we lost the first goal. We're hoping you don't lose yours.