By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
A life-long passion for football (soccer in the US) and expertise in software engineering led to the creation of an all-encompassing digital platform to help coaches and clubs in a range of sports manage their teams.
The brainchild of its founder and CEO Shlomi Meiner, Easy Coach enables a club manager to monitor and evaluate every member of the team – from performances on the pitch to physical fitness and injuries and even how well they do in individual training exercises.
It is also a tactical planner, allowing the staff to prepare and assess set plays ahead of a game, build and schedule training programs and create a library of football-related content to support and educate the staff and players at the club.
“We cover all of the needs of a club – it’s a one-stop shop,” Meiner tells NoCamels.
He explains that the software is “very easy” to use and takes into account to the needs of each individual club. The dynamic nature of the platform, he explains, also allows individual users to further tweak the settings to meet their own requirements.
“It’s tailored to every single club – from the smallest ones like [Israel’s] Hapoel Karmiel to the biggest ones like [Spanish top flight team] Villareal CF,” he says.
“Instead of developing one off-the-shelf software [package]… with everything I develop I think how I can adjust it for everyone together.”
To date, the platform has been adopted by the Israel Football Association (IFA) and the national team, as well as dozens of other clubs and leagues – amateur and professional – around the world.
Aside from Villareal, the league of users includes the Croatian Football Federation, leading Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk and teams in South Africa and Bulgaria.
Showing early promise as a potential professional footballer, Meiner played both in Israel and the US, until he realized at the age of 18 that he was not going to make it.
“I understood that I would not become a football player and that I was not good enough to become a football player,” he recalls.
But even with his dream over, Meiner’s passion for the game never waned, nor did his love for the statistics of the sport.
“I was always this guy about statistics,” he says. “I have notebooks that my mother kept [from] the age of 10 or 12. I used to write statistics about matches that I’d watched.”
He was also playing games where he could virtually manage teams, an experience that later helped him to develop the Easy Coach platform.
His compulsory service in the Israeli army behind him roughly a decade ago, Meiner obtained his degree in software engineering and began working in the tech sector. He also completed a UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) course on football theory and practices.
“I knew that one day I will deal with software for football,” he says. “This is what I wanted to do – to create information systems for football.”
At around this time, he struck up a friendship with Patrick van Leeuwen, then the head coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s youth academy who also had an interest in software development.
Meiner persuaded van Leeuwen to let him create a basic program for team management. He then realized that the professional software used by clubs was lacking and began to develop his own platform in his free time.
In 2021, he took the plunge and set up his own company, beginning with a pilot program for the youth academies at Israeli clubs Hapoel Tel Aviv and Hapeol Be’er Sheva.
“It went really well,” he recalls. “I gave them simple software in the beginning. They were just building session plans and managing the match reports [but] they really liked it.”
The company’s funding comes from private investors led by three venture capital companies, and is actually in the middle of its latest round of fundraising. Coincidentally, one of the three VC firms is called Anfield – also the home ground of the world-famous Liverpool FC.
Word of the Easy Coach platform soon spread in the sports world. The IFA came knocking, followed by more and more clubs, both in Israel and abroad. Meiner attributes this success to the Easy Coach team including the programmers who work to provide each club with a bespoke platform.
“Our employees are sports lovers, so they really enjoy it,” he says.
Today, Easy Coach even has an office at the IFA headquarters in Ramat Gan, and the two organizations are now working on what Meiner calls a “huge project.”
The company that started with football is now expanding into other sports such as basketball, and all the while working on refining the software.
“We are one of the best,” Meiner says of the range of team management software on the market, “and I want to be the best.”
But even so, for Meiner playing a role in the improvement of the beautiful game in his homeland is the realization of his true goal.
“My dream is to impact Israeli sports and to helping our athletes and clubs get to a better place – and I do it for my passion,” he says.
“I am sitting with you from the IFA offices. For me it’s a dream come true.”
