So — it's Wednesday, and today England take on Argentina in the men's World Cup semi-final. To celebrate this, and my addiction to buildign stuff with AI I built something clever. A second screen of all the information and stats you want to immerse yourself into the game. A second screen running next to your massive TV playing the match — live score, a full stat wall, goals and cards as they happen, a form guide for both sides. It is all the information that the broadcast team get - only you now get it too.
This is me experimenting and having fun with AI, building something I've wanted for years.
It started with rugby
Rugby's my sport, and I've never forgiven broadcast television for how little of it actually gets said out loud. Someone makes a hit, the commentator says "another big tackle there," and I'd want to know - how many hits has x-player made today as it feels like a lot, and how many of those were dominant? I love it when they give the detail behind the game you're enjoying.
So I built the thing I'd been idly wishing existed for about a decade. I called it Ruck State — a room that opens on each Rugby Union tournament and fills with the numbers commentators reach for but rarely show: set piece, carries, discipline, kicking, a full squad sheet, not just the players who scored. Real stats, pulled live from ESPN's feed. Not a mock-up.
Then it became three rooms.
One room became a lab
Formula 1 got the next one — Pit Wall. Lap times, tyre strategy windows, pit stops, a replayable session you can scrub through like the broadcast never lets you. F1 people LOVE stats I though - so I built it. (Although my brother, George Sharman - a massive F1 fan - showed me that it already exists and people pay good money to subscribe to those data!)
And then the World Cup started, England men reached the semi-final, and I had an engine sitting there with an obvious place to point it.
The football swerve
I'm not, historically, a football obsessive in the way I'm a rugby one. But I wasn't going to sit this one out. Match Room turns ESPN's World Cup feed into the same treatment: fixtures, live score, an eight-tile stat wall, goal and card timelines, player leaders, form guides — the tension of knockout football sat next to the broadcast instead of buried in a graphic three hours later.
(Small honest admission: part of what got this finished on schedule was a stack of my AI Fable 5 credits sitting in my account that were about to disappear when they dropped off my subscription. Nothing like watching something useful evaporate to focus the mind.)
One decision I'm properly pleased with: the result is hidden by default. Open a finished match and every stat's there — shots, corners, cards, the lot — with the actual score blacked out until you choose to reveal it. Small thing. Except it's really a bet about who this is for. Not everyone watches live. Some people are catching up two hours later and don't want the score spoiled by a stray notification. Building for the person watching on delay, not just the person watching live — that's the user experience I wanted, so I built it.
Why this matters more than the sport
Step back from the tackles and the stat walls for a second, because the sport isn't really the point.
I'm a strategist. Not a developer. I didn't really know what an API was two years ago, and I still couldn't draw you a diagram of how any of this actually works under the bonnet. What I can do is want something specific enough, badly enough, and be stubborn about asking for it until it exists.
So three sports databases exist now. Not perfect ones — I hit ESPN's rate limits, found possession percentages quietly wrong by a factor of a hundred, spent an evening arguing with myself about which way a territory bar should round. But they exist, built in evenings, by someone whose actual job is thinking about brands as well as AI. That's the experiment. Not the rugby stats. The fact that wanting something enough is now most of the way to having it.
England play Argentina Today - Wednesday - and the Match Room is open ready for people's second screen, properly rooting for them, stat wall and all. If it's not England you've got left in this tournament, the room works exactly the same for whoever you're shouting for — pick your match and watch it fill in.
Come watch it with me: harrysharman.com/projects/world-cup-match-room
Whether building three sports databases counts as a normal way to support your team is a question I'm choosing not to examine too closely. Ask me after the final.