We'll be building a live product together. The difference between this and other tutorials is that I intend to make revenue from it as well as making it available to the general public for anyone to learn from its codebase. Its not just a tutorial idea but something that would generate profit and serve as a competition to other similar products. Having mentioned that this football manager would remain free for everyone, though our API provider would offer a free tier, there would be pricing categories as we need to maintain servers and bring in better hands. This project does not end with the tutorial, it will be an ongoing effort as no code is ever truly complete.

I'll try to release updates for everyone to follow along weekly or at least monthly depending on how busy I am. Also Sharing ideas and contributing is greatly welcomed and encourage as I'm no expert. Just a point to note; I started working on this idea as far back as 2018, Initially I started with Vanilla JS, HTML and PHP, then I switched to React and Node, before transitioning to Next and Express, after that it was solely Next running both frontend and backend, and finally/currently Next@15 Express again but this time all in TypeScript. Its not a complete project as you would see for yourself, we'll be building everything from scratch together.

Allow me to introduce Wave Research: A football manager also offering sports related API provider. What brought about it? I'm a lover of football coaching simulation and football in general. I got the inspiration from a post in a popular manager game I was addicted to, where a user (another manager) asked if the developers of this game actually played the game they built. I tried reaching out but no response. The issue I noticed with most simulation is tied to the fact that:

1. They do not seek feedback from users/managers as there was no easy way at first to make any suggestion.
2. The task in most managerial game are mostly repetitive from my view and at such boring.
3. Since it lacks competitiveness as a result of flawed game monitoring where a single user or manager as I would call anyone who play football manager can control multiple teams and this leads to match fixing where a manager uses low ranking players against specific team.
4. No fair play in terms of transfer as a manager can easily take control of a team and withing a short period sell premium players in that team for a fee that's close to nothing or even release them to become free agents which would end up allowing free transfers or even players swap deals not being regulated too.
5. Having built a fully functioning football manager game you hardly find a resources proving soccer data for developers to build with or even experiment.

This among many other issues are what I intend to address in this application while at the same time offering an avenue for people new to web development to learn from a real project, not a project that ends with the tutorial. Code snippets would be shared along this series, but I strongly encourage you follow through on GitHub and updates would be released regularly as time permits.

Happy hacking 🦦