Squadra — a football lineup builder for iOS and the web.

Squadra is a football lineup builder that helps people create into polished, shareable lineup graphics. Users can choose a formation, add and rearrange players, customise the visual style and export their lineup for social media.

Why I made Squadra

Squadra was the app I have always wanted to make. I’m a huge football fan, and I would often see lineup graphics shared online with predicted XIs for the next match, what a team would look like at the end of a transfer window, or even dream teams. There are already a number of football lineup builder sites and apps, but they are all ad-ridden and ugly. So being a designer, I wanted to build one that wasn’t.

What I did

It started with a prompt to Claude, explaining an idea I’d had in my head for years: a cross-platform app that would let anyone create and export a lineup without an account. People could create an account to save multiple lineups, or subscribe to a pro tier for advanced features and extra customisation.

What finally got things moving was discovering a reasonably inexpensive API for real player data. Users could type a name and choose from over 15,000 men’s and women’s players across the major leagues, with names, clubs and positions helping surface the right player. Or they could enter names manually to create a lineup for their Sunday league team.

I spent months prompting and designing the entire app. The core builder, pitch interactions, player and team search, formation picker, lineup management and kit customisation took up the bulk of the work. There were also many miserable evenings spent trying to understand the backend and infrastructure, bouncing between Supabase and Fly.io and getting Google and Apple sign in working. Stripe, RevenueCat and Cloudflare were part of the mix too.

Getting the app working was only part of the work. I spent months designing, testing and refining how it should look and behave, working through interactions and details that a few prompts alone couldn’t resolve. Being a perfectionist, it was at times difficult to know where to draw the line: I had to back down from creating my own database not being wholly satisfied with the provider’s data.

One thing I’m particularly fond of is the player shirt marker. With a preset of patterns and colours, you can recreate the shirt of virtually any football team on earth. You can even give players their own individual shirt markers to represent their clubs.

I focused on getting the web version feature-complete before moving on to the dedicated mobile version, built with Expo. I’d always intended Squadra to be primarily a mobile app, so adapting the design to desktop was the bigger design challenge. For the web interface, I chose a bold neon green against a dark UI to complement the brand I was developing alongside it. Moving to mobile brought its own frustrations, particularly around in-app subscriptions.

Overall, I’m incredibly proud of what I made, even if I arguably went too deep. Taking an idea through to a published product taught me a great deal about the less visible side of product design, including authentication, payments, data, SEO, marketing, infrastructure and App Store requirements. Squadra has found some users, but it still costs more to run each month than it earns. It’s a real labour of love.