Fourteen yearsof other people’s weekends

A score is worth something for about ninety seconds. Everything here is judged on whether it arrives in time.

Live football is a solved problem for the twenty clubs everyone already covers. It is not solved for the Peruvian second division, a Ghanaian cup tie or a women’s regional league — and those matches matter just as much to the people watching them. Breadth is the whole point, and it is the part nobody else wants to maintain.

Three commitments

• Nothing between you and the score. No account, no sign-up, no onboarding.
• Fast where the network is slow. Compact feeds and hard caching are a feature, not an optimisation.
• Open where it counts. If software speaks on our behalf, you should be able to read what it says.

The shift we are betting on

For a decade the question was how to get football data onto a screen. That is changing. People increasingly ask an assistant instead of opening an app, and assistants are confidently wrong about this week’s results because their training data stopped months ago. Giving them a live, honest source is the most useful thing a football data company can do right now — which is why LiveScore MCP is free, read-only and open.

The apps are not going anywhere. The bet is simply that a result should be available wherever the question is asked: on a phone, in a browser tab, or mid-conversation with a model.

Who builds it

Football Mania was founded by Gillis Haasnoot, a Dutch developer who wrote the first version — an Android app called Voetbal Livescore — in 2012 and still maintains the data pipeline, the apps, the website and the MCP server today. The company behind it is Sportalize B.V., registered in the Netherlands.

Football Mania has never been the only thing. He has spent two decades in Dutch technology: at the games company Spil Games, as CTO of Payaut, the payments platform for online marketplaces, and today on the development team at digital agency New Story. What he builds outside work ranges well beyond football — ESP32 hardware dashboards, a ray-traced rendering engine, autonomous agent frameworks — most of it public on GitHub.

Sportalize B.V. is the entity behind the apps, football-mania.com and LiveScore MCP. It is deliberately small: no office, no layers, no headcount plan. What it does have is an unusual amount of automation, because the alternative to hiring has been to teach software to do the work.

The goal is a fully automated company — development, marketing, bookkeeping, SEO and customer support run by agents, with a human setting direction rather than doing the tasks.

That is not a slogan written after the fact. It is already how much of the company operates, and the remaining gaps are the actual roadmap.

There is a reason to say this out loud rather than keep it quiet. A one-person company serving millions of users only works if the boring parts are genuinely automated, and that shows up in the product: no sign-up wall to maintain, no upsell funnel to staff, no reason to collect data nobody needs. The automation is why Football Mania can stay free and keep covering the leagues that would never pay for themselves.