After an otherwise forgettable football game a decade ago, as I forlornly walked out of the ground and headed for the train station, a friend turned to me, and in a minor way, influenced my behaviour over the subsequent years.
“Well,” he said. “That wasn’t exactly the result I wanted for my 500th game.”
There followed a few seconds of silence as I worked out my emotions. Contempt? Jealousy? A bit of both? I asked how on earth he knew this. “Are you not on ’hopper?” he replied.
No, I was not. But, whatever it was, I was soon going to be. That evening, I downloaded the app, then (and sometimes still) known as Groundhopper, since rebranded to the sexier name Futbology.
Though that’s where the sexiness ends.
Futbology essentially has two purposes.
The first is that you can enter any location in the world, and a date, and it will produce a list of every football match — often going down to terrifyingly tinpot levels of the game — happening in the area. The second is that if you choose to attend one, and use your geolocation to check in, it will compile all your check-ins and produce a list of statistics you didn’t ever know you needed. So I know that, in 2025, I have attended 67 matches in six countries, which have produced 220 goals. Those games have taken place at 36 different grounds, 15 of which I was visiting for the first time.
It’s Spotify Wrapped for football fandom.
Moreover, you can backdate your personal numbers if you have a good memory or an extensive collection of programmes.
This gives more useless information.
I know, for example, that when I went to Crystal Palace’s 2-0 defeat of Brentford at the start of November, it was the first time I’d seen Palace win in 15 attempts. I also know that when I attended Brentford’s 3-1 victory over Burnley four weeks later, it meant I had seen all 20 current Premier League clubs play. (Of course, this isn’t a particularly impressive achievement, but I had never realised I’d spent my life avoiding Burnley.)
The app was the brainchild of Lars Erik Bolstad and Geir Florhaug, two Norwegian lovers of football and travel.
“We’d travelled to watch football together for many years by that point,” explains Bolstad, a 57-year-old computer scientist, speaking from Oslo. “There was one specific match we’d been to, but we couldn’t remember when it was. I said, ‘Surely there must be an app for that, that lets you keep track of the matches you’ve been to’. I couldn’t find any. Well, I decided that would be quite an interesting project…”
The Cae Clyd ground in Blaenau Ffestiniog, north Wales – a rare treat for Futbology users (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
Thirteen years later, it is his full-time job.
The app has exploded in popularity over recent years — a recent Borussia Dortmund match had 2,000 check-ins — in part because of that controversial name change.
“It became clear the ‘Groundhopper’ name was not optimal,” Bolstad explains. “This ‘groundhopping’ phenomenon was only known in northern Europe — UK, Germany, Scandinavia, Benelux. Outside that region, people in southern Europe and South America had no idea what this was, and the name had no connection with football. They didn’t know it was a football app.”
And this, really, is a key point. I am not a groundhopper, as such. I’m not desperately trying to get to as many grounds as possible. But I love tracking my activity, statistically and geographically. Equally, I also know that I’ve attended some matches because I do want to boost my numbers.
And this is the genius and the problem with so many apps: what starts off becoming a way to track your activity ends up being the driver of your activity. You become compelled to walk more steps, gain more followers, or get more dating app matches.
Futbology guides you to questionable matches of a different kind. From personal experience, if you find yourself in a country for some other purpose, you will end up going to a Danish third-division game, or a goalless draw between Oman and Ecuador in Qatar, or an Irish mid-table match. You might end up watching a friend play a Sunday league cup tie because it’s only down the road, and well, that ground was a ‘need’.
At the World Cup three years ago, I decided to shun Ghana vs Uruguay, the narrative-laden rematch between the sides involved in the infamous Luis Suarez handball incident in the 2010 tournament, and instead went to South Korea vs Portugal, because I knew that was my last chance to to go the Education City Stadium in Al-Rayyan, my only remaining ‘need’ to receive my World Cup 2022 badge by completing all eight grounds used in the competition. Actually, that worked out well: a 2-1 South Korea win meant both sides sneaked into the knockout stage, and I was at the more significant game. Thanks to Futbology for that.
Portugal vs South Korea at the 2022 World Cup, a game importantly held at Education City Stadium (Liu Lu/VCG via Getty Images)
Germans account for the highest share of users. Some have staggering statistics.
A man named Andi Bruck has attended over 14,000 matches. Jens-Uwe Hanssen has visited 8,787 grounds. There is some British representation on the leaderboards: Bolton Wanderers’ former club secretary Simon Marland holds the record for most matches at one club, with over 4,700.
Futbology often feels like its own little world.
One of the more curious concepts is the X account known as ‘Groundhop Police’, which asks for reports of other people adding matches illegitimately. It has flagged examples of Futbology users ticking off grounds by doing a stadium tour, by watching a rugby match there, by finishing a marathon in the stadium, or — perhaps most disgracefully — attending concerts. Since a result needs to be added for each ‘manual’ check-in, it’s difficult not to get rattled by seeing a check-in at Coventry City’s stadium alongside “The Killers 0-0 Blossoms”.
Equally, there are examples of fabled check-in locations.
In London, for example, four users were lucky enough to gain attendance to the one-off match in the gardens of Buckingham Palace in 2013, Polytechnic FC’s 2-1 win against Civil Service FC. South of the River Thames, some have (legitimately) checked off a cricket ground: The Oval, as Corinthian-Casuals used to play home games there. Rare matches at the Crystal Palace athletics stadium also attract a high number of users.
And beyond these novelty check-ins, the app is providing a genuine service: making it easier for football fans to find football games, boosting attendance at lower levels. Some sides, including Sutton United and Cheltenham Town, have realised the value of the app and arranged collaborations. Elsewhere, dedicated fans of smaller teams have received special ‘loyalty badges’ for achieving the longest streak of check-ins, and are rewarded by their club with a small prize, like getting to go into the dressing room before a match.
But Futbology is not driven by clubs. It is genuinely driven by fans. The app has not invented the concept of groundhopping, or attending random football matches, but it’s certainly made it easier.
Sometimes, at English non-League games with only 200-odd fans, you will find a couple of dozen check-ins, all with, say, Scandinavian names, often taking in an extra game before the main event of a Premier League fixture the following day.
They, of course, are people just like the app’s inventor, Bolstad. He was at the first full-capacity game at the Hill Dickinson Stadium, Everton’s pre-season friendly with Roma in August, to re-complete the 20 Premier League grounds at the earliest possible opportunity. He met up with several Futbology users who were there to re-complete the 92.
There were plenty of Futbology users at Everton’s game with Roma in the summer (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
The 92 is a long-established concept, of course. But the nice thing about Futbology is that everyone isn’t doing the same thing. They all have their own little achievements, their own targets.
I’ve encountered people who have genuine pride that they’re the Futbology leader for their club’s home stadium, someone who is trying to tick off all 55 nations under the banner of UEFA, European football’s governing body, and somebody who aims to see 500 goals per year so cheers every one that comes along in his matches, regardless of which team scores it.
But these are extreme cases.
“The majority of users are now general football fans, who just enjoy watching football live in the stadium,” says Bolstad. “The ones who don’t go to the pub to watch it. They don’t sit at home and watch it on the sofa, they go to the stadium.”
Be warned: if this convinces you to get involved, the Futbology mindset is not just for Christmas, it’s for life.
On the way home from an away match recently, I asked the same friend who introduced me to the app if he fancied stopping off at a pub near the station. “Yeah, go on then, a quick one,” he said, a little reluctantly. “That pub is a ‘need’.”